“... characterisation of the aunt even as she took unexpected charge of the plot, Freeman initiated the first of the quarrels that were to trouble the family both within the narrative and outside it. Howells’s letter to the magazine’s editor, Elizabeth Jordan, has not survived, but according to Jordan, it ‘almost scorched the paper it was written ...”

“... letters with which he followed up his four volumes in 1987 included some then published for the first time. Presumably, all this confusion will be swept aside when the projected 30 volumes of the compete edition recently announced by the University of Nebraska Press see print over the next several decades, but even specialists are likely to find the results ...”

“... letters are above all the record of a literary relation. ‘I send you the little book,’ the first letter begins. ‘I have been disappointed in not being able to have it bound in time: but I wish that its worst fault were on its outside!’ The editors speculate that the faulty little book in question was EBB’s translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus ...”

“... The first time Alexander Masters met Stuart Shorter, he was crouched in a doorway next to the discount picture-framing shop round the corner from Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge: as it happens, the framing shop I used to work for as a sandwich boarder in my teens. Every Saturday the shop owner would hand me a board and a stack of leaflets and I’d hurry down to Christ’s Pieces, a public green in town which was also, I now know, Stuart’s home ...”

“... herself up in the immolation scene; Jürgen Flimm turns Nibelheim into a microchip factory. In Ruth Berghaus’s Frankfurt Götterdämmerung, described in some detail by Patrick Carnegy, the murdered Siegfried ‘was not solemnly borne aloft but brutally kicked aside by Hagen’s men’. Not all of these images are stupid or anti-musical, but as a whole ...”

“... is a poetry of roots, his generation’s is a poetry of rootlessness. One can see this from the first books of Stephen Romer (born like Hofmann in 1957) and Alan Moore (born 1960), and from the two outstanding contributors to New Chatto Poets, Adam Thorpe (born 1956) and Alan Jenkins (born 1955). One might call these four poets ‘sophisticated’, though ...”

“... comment on America is intended, the novel has another aspect which requires some discussion first (and which leads back to the subject of treason anyway). Jailbird is a typical Vonnegut narrative – which is to say something quite narrow and precise. On the strength of the previous novels, a kind of Identikit Vonnegut plot could be drawn up, as ...”

“... heroines have hitherto been mostly writers of one sort or another. A Start in Life tells us how Ruth Weiss, a scholarly woman, elegant and capable, has had little success with men. She is writing a thesis on Balzac’s women, and of any handsome man is likely to say, with Eugénie Grandet, Je suis trop laide, il ne fera pas attention à moi. How such an ...”

“... where he stammered when he talked in public. ‘Blood has been moved between two dogs for the first time. Before the Society, Mr King and Mr Thomas Coxe successfully performed the experiment on a small bulldog and a spaniel.’ He fled debtors; was bankrupt from 1671; had to shift households and sell many of his books. He travelled to Paris with his ...”

“... one foot high on the moral ground of traditional liberalism, obeying only half of Oscar Wilde’s First Rule of Camp: to ‘treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.’ Another contemporary Mattel Inc. by-product bristling with trademark signs gave me pause, however: this bitch ...”

“... to know our business with the dead. David Marr unfolds it, steadily, over seven hundred pages. The first vindication of his huge and wonderful book is that it offers ways into all of White’s work, uncovering materials which were taken up and transformed in the making of the novels, the stories and – not least – those dark, bizarre and often hilarious ...”

“... single transferable vote in Scottish council elections. Overnight, the Nationalists had, for the first time, a feasible route to local power in parts of the country, particularly urban areas, where they’d never had any success. Four years later, the SNP formed a minority government in Edinburgh. Even then Labour could have reasserted control. In 2008, its ...”

“... served her apprenticeship as one of the dutiful translators of Isaac Bashevis Singer, along with Ruth Schachner Finkel, Rosanna Gerber, Dorothea Straus et al. She seems no less expert with the Yiddish of an older master, Sholom Aleichem, best-known to English readers as the chronicler of the Jewish poor in the shtetl of the 1880s, the low-life, high-thinking ...”

“... are central to the action, not least in one of Coppard’s most anthologised stories, ‘Dusky Ruth’, in which an overnight traveller is beguiled by a young woman with hair ‘as black as a rook’s wings’. As for the names of his characters, they sound like bit parts in a Shakespeare play: Codling, Cocking, Knatchbole, Tottel, Crabbe, Dogtrees. The ...”

“... are often taken with the lovely fresh suddenness of her titles. Dance of the Happy Shades, her first book (1968), finds its name in a young child’s piano piece, a name brimming in the title story with the kind of minor-key paradox that spills out into the whole of the book. Something I’ve been meaning to tell you (1974) pays tribute to a favourite ...”