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“... a new hand, Jim, look at my hand, Jim, it’s waving, it will never go home again. The translator, Don Bartlett, must take credit for the assurance of the cadences. Women don’t quite have the monopoly on empathy, but it’s chiefly a female accomplishment. It’s true that Tommy, when arrested as a teenager, notices ...”

“... of masturbation and compulsive self-harming. Henrik’s coda would make a useful introduction to Don Bartlett’s translation of the first instalment of My Struggle, which Knausgaard’s British publishers have called A Death in the Family. In addition to explaining the aura of mystery that surrounds Karl Ove’s father – who’s indistinguishable ...”

“... Chasing a cross-dressing serial killer through a tunnel beneath Helsinki, Timo Harjunpää, the hero of The Priest of Evil by Matti-Yrjänä Joensuu, pulls out his gun and then pauses to consider the health and safety implications of what he’s doing. ‘He recalled that this communal tunnel was used for almost everything: water and drainage, heating, electricity, telephone cables ...”

“... susceptibility to absorption and enchantment that we associate with intoxicants in adults (when we don’t associate it with a mental disorder). ‘The child sees everything as a novelty,’ Baudelaire wrote, ‘the child is always “drunk”.’ And genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to ...”

“... of the potatoes was made up, are the books true, in the way we understand true to be? If they don’t have a faithful relationship with ‘what happened’, does it matter? Might they even in some ways be better? Book 2 of My Struggle follows the first-person protagonist, Karl Ove Knausgaard, as he falls in love with his second wife, Linda, impregnates ...”

“... here with Six, maybe you ought to read Book 1 first. Q. Is this fiction or autobiography? A. I don’t know. He uses both words, and sometimes calls it a novel. Indeed, sometimes he seems to think of each individual volume as a separate novel, which may give us a clue. As for autobiography, he does use real names, which is part of the uproar over this ...”

“... his tastes in Classical music: ‘I prefer Puccini to Wagner, Mozart to Bach, Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote to anything by Brahms, except his violin concerto, Beethoven to any of the moderns, Vivaldi to Schoenberg.’ Described this way, his preferences sound like the early-round results of a double-elimination tournament; one wonders what the results would ...”