“... egos, abound and contrast. There is a character called Coetzee in each section, and a narrator, Eugene Dawn, in the first section who shares many of the author’s traits, notably a meticulous tidiness with his papers and the feeling that he’s only really happy among books; both qualities seem allied to the novel’s strategy of metafictional ...”

“... a Spartan slave – clutching at a sword plunged into his heart. The statue is fashioned out of black corset whalebones, and is fixed to a trolley – also of corset whalebones – whose wheels rest on two rails made of a coarse, red, gelatinous substance that turns out to be calves’ lights (the gastronomic delicacy made from the lungs of young ...”

“... wings – Snowflakes knock spots off Philibert de L’Orme Woodcut adoring kings with narrow eye Black-bottomed whitewear out of nowhere fast You see the azure through the muscatel The white opacities we hear as thunder The fact that each is an iambic pentameter disturbs their individual impact by turning them, in this listing, into a sort of joke stanza ...”

“... small doses might prevent them from returning to the religion of their baptism. In the same volume Eugene Tesson, a Jesuit, sanctioned physicians to administer pain relief only to the dying who had ‘made an act of submission to the Divine’ and those ‘in danger of falling into despair and blaspheming the goodness of God’. Such opinions are a reminder ...”

“... during the German occupation’ (Resistance party?), he became the lover of Christine, a young black woman who would end up a follower of Malcolm X. Monroe, it turned out, was the only white star who had ever interested Christine. In fact she identified with her: ‘She’s been hurt. She knows the score … I don’t read the gossip stuff. That’s what ...”

“... performed in it; and the minor hall beside it, which can stage chamber operas, is painted close to black inside and needs only a glitter ball to suggest a suburban disco. How come? The exterior of the building was designed by one architect, the Danish master Jørn Utzon; the inside by a confused committee, or, as the Australian critic Philip Drew sourly calls ...”

“... In fact he savages them. Fred, the oldest sibling, is unlikely to be bothered by being likened to Eugene Wrayburn, nor Franny and her husband by being greeted as the Veneerings, unless they’re avid readers of Our Mutual Friend on the sly, but Rose (‘Miss Piggy’), Hubby (‘Giant Haystacks’) and Jay himself (‘Plastic Man’) don’t need to work to ...”

“... South African material in the dramatic forms supplied by Tennessee Williams, Clifford Odets, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, Fugard found what he needed in Camus’s treatment of Algeria: ‘when I first encountered the articulation of that almost pagan, sensual life lived out in the sun, next to a sea, with warm rocks being, in a sense, the ultimate ...”

“... coloured in. A green line runs down the middle, from brow to nose and chin. The hair is blue-black, the side of the face to the left of the green line is pale yellow; that to the right, flesh pink. The background is viridian to the right, pink-mauve top left, orange bottom left. Yet this image, which apparently overturns an ‘accepted way of ...”

“... or thrown into shadow, with one point of high light in an area of gloom or foreground figures black against brightness, with the key shifting according to mood. These decisions were in keeping with Welles’s monumental analysis of the hero: the camera would delve like a shovel or coax as a sculptor chips a block of stone to find the lurking image. He ...”

“... and just a year after Lloyd George’s battle with the House of Lords over the People’s Budget. Eugene Debs, candidate of the Socialist Party of America, won almost a million votes in the presidential election of 1912. The seeming ascendance of the working class coloured the politics of the age and, in turn, determined an important element of the ...”

“... furore has surrounded her, beginning with the ‘Testimony against Gertrude Stein’ that Eugene Jolas put together as a special supplement to the February 1935 issue of transition, including angry contributions from Matisse, Braque, Tristan Tzara and others. ‘These documents invalidate the claim of the Toklas-Stein memorial that Miss Stein was in ...”

“... and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s Cathedral, Londonderry, of Gráinne, daughter of Northern Ireland’s Education Minister Martin McGuinness (not yet knighted for his varied public services, but it’s early days), and Sean ‘Harpie’ Hargan, the Derry football hero. The TV wasn’t ...”