“... to know was to miss everything.’ He recalls the attraction he felt, when young and in Paris, for Paul Joukowsky, who had invited James to his room. James waits on the street, looking up at Paul’s window, simultaneously knowing he will not go up to the room and storing up memories which will later make him wonder ‘if ...”

“... short career, are black: empty space, crumbling walls, desolate streets; the action crowded into a corner. He used friends, apprentices and sex workers as models, and didn’t flinch from painting their desperation; there is the compromised eroticism of the teenage boys he made over into Cupid or (worse) John the Baptist, boys appealing and appalling in equal ...”

“... only a passing mention, identified as ‘a philosopher, the brother of the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein’. Robert Musil occupies the summit of Canetti’s esteem until he is demoted after a show of petulance at a tactless mention of his archrival Thomas Mann. Herman Broch was Canetti’s great friend at the beginning of the period but fades out ...”

“... and a fan is someone who equivocates by adoring the star he may possibly attack. In another corner of the mass culture we inhabit, America, and even Britain, have glamorous political leaders who run the same risks as any star of stage and screen. The Kennedy brothers may not have been killed for reasons that resemble those that influenced Chapman: we ...”

“... of various ethnicities. There was Jovo, a Montenegrin with a huge black moustache. There was Paul, a Serb, who had been a partisan and had a long scar on his cheek. There was a Slovenian hunter who wore a Tyrolean jacket and played the accordion. My mother would rustle up something to eat, and everybody would sit around the Tilley lamp and talk – about ...”

“... lymphoma at the age of 32, O’Hara recalled his first impressions of her: ‘She was sitting in a corner, sulking and biting her lower lip – long blonde hair, brown eyes. Roman-striped skirt. As if it were a movie, she was glamorous and aloof. The girl I was talking to said: “That’s Bunny Lang. I’d like to give her a good slap.”’ If Lang’s ...”

“... with a beady stare where he imagined I might disagree. He was not to be deterred from fighting his corner. The last time I saw Freddie was in the autumn of 1988, when we were both attending an Oxford discussion group he had formed well before my time. He was suffering badly from emphysema and could only walk a few paces before losing his breath. He greeted me ...”

“... consolidated an intellectual shift towards conservatism that has penetrated into almost every corner of British society since the mid-1970s. Feminism, always linked to the fortunes of the Left and always vulnerable in the face of unemployment, has not been exempt, and we now seem to be living through one of the movement’s periodic pauses for breath ...”

“... as these) or very large photographs, such as those by Marc Atkins in the Foundry, on the corner of Great Eastern Street.* Both are self-conscious, uneasy about the urban landscape, careful to avoid the bathos of head-on romanticism. An art filter takes the edge off reality. Reeves has assembled a collection of shots of peeling and layered ...”

“... Gerry. Both were kissing during a roll-call and were found snuggled together under a blanket in a corner of another compound. This amused the Italians, who put them into solitary together for a week. He makes a study of parcel-sharing from all its points of view, economic, political and psychological, and we leave him describing his resistless rise into big ...”

“... in excessive sorrow over his death,’ Oë writes, ‘nor out of despair over being driven into a corner where she had no other choice ... She chose to share his fate, and did so completely.’ But Oë makes clear that he is guessing here, believing what he wants to believe, and he is not as calm or as bland as he sounds. The young man’s diligence at work ...”

“... artists working on the home front produced suitably boosterish images of British resilience – Paul Nash with his flying boats in Defence of Albion, Duncan Grant with his lush pictures of blooming countryside – Piper wasn’t afraid of a little darkness. In the ARP regional control centre in Bristol he found modernist typography stencilled on the ...”

“... refuge in their shadows, relieved. While the adults killed or were killed, we drew pictures in a corner. While the country was falling to pieces, we were learning to talk, to walk, to fold napkins in the shape of boats, of aeroplanes. While the novel was happening, we played hide-and-seek, we played at disappearing.The place where Fernández and an older ...”

“... all your helpless nakedness, must really hurt.The LRB last reviewed a book by Klein in 2014, when Paul Kingsnorth was unpersuaded by her case that climate change could be, indeed had to be, indeed was, best opposed by an unwieldy combination of Blockadia – the word she was then using for direct action of the Keystone XL-Ende Gelände sort – and a globally ...”

“... literature. Josipovici contrasts the attitude to death expounded by Plato and yearned for by St Paul. They welcomed it, as the abandonment of the uselessly material, but for the Greeks death brings sadness and pain. In a wonderful reading of the Biblical stories of David, and of Esau and Jacob, Josipovici rightly emphasises the theological restraint ...”