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“... closest friend was Susan Sontag. Still, no publisher wanted Taubes’s first novella, A Lament for Julia, and when her novel, Divorcing, was published in the US in 1969, it was panned by Hugh Kenner in the New York Times as the work of a ‘lady novelist’. A few days later, at the age of 41, she walked into the sea in the Hamptons. Sontag identified the ...”

“... Until very recently I had never read any B.S. Johnson. I had a staticky reminiscence of what he might have been, which could be represented, using his own idiosyncratic conventions for marking the lapses that run through our consciousness of the world, as ‘experimental … . suicide … . wrists was it?’To clear the static first: these reprints are to celebrate what would have been the eightieth birthday of the novelist B ...”

“... suggestive narratives: one, from around 1996, constellates Magic Johnson, O.J. Simpson, Michael Jordan, Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X and others in a fraught tribute to Black masculinity.Tompkins’s work is attuned to all the nuances of race, gender and class that fabric can signify. When set next to each other to accentuate textural contrast, seemingly ...”

“... There​ weren’t any gays in Jordan in the 1980s. There were khawals (‘faggots’) and tants (‘sissy boys’): these words, uttered with contempt, were a feature of my childhood long before I understood what they meant. Then they became clues to the explanation for my own feeling of wrongness. In the wake of the First Gulf War, our cloistered world in Amman was penetrated by the internet and cable TV, and online chat rooms and American sitcoms offered a language and a way of thinking previously unimaginable to adolescents like me, who had no words with which to conceive their sexuality and no forum in which to express it ...”

“... a messenger boy for Reuters, an office boy for an auctioneer, a junior clerk for Sunlight Soap and Jordan & Co, and a cashier for an engineering company. It was sprinting he excelled at, though, which presumably served him well at Reuters, where he’d sometimes carry out his duties on roller skates. Curiously, the name given to his kind of running was ...”

“... English crowd is the best behaved in the world.’ ‘Dear good English people,’ thinks Julia, ‘who never make trouble no matter how bad it is.’ It’s clear that such thoughts are complacent and self-centred, and the basic situation of Party Going brilliantly illustrates money’s power to insulate the few from the hardships of the many. But ...”

“... and international press, diplomats and representatives from the world’s liberation movements. Julia Hervé, the daughter of Richard Wright, came from Paris to interpret from English into French. I did the same, into English, for the Cleavers. ‘We are an integral part of Africa’s history,’ Cleaver said at the conference. ‘White America teaches us ...”