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“... to reach beyond the confines of the possible or the acceptable. And yet, it’s one thing to read about animal-human sex in Yeats – ‘How can those terrified vague fingers push/The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?’ – and another to think about, say, your neighbour getting down with Fluffy. Could he be? So what if he is? And what does ...”

“... actually – which were called Freeman, Hardy and Willis – were trained by Barry’s brother, Richard, who showed David how to work with the birds himself. Everything had the appropriate size about it.’ Loach’s sense of ‘appropriate size’ remains to this day the key to his achievement as a filmmaker.Kes marked a conscious departure from the ...”

“... Roth chose Blake Bailey, the well-regarded biographer of Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend), Richard Yates and John Cheever, three alcohol-plagued novelists whose torments kept late hours. As it happened Atlas would outlive Roth only by a year, dying in September 2019 from complications of a lung condition. At the close of Remembering Roth, he bids sad ...”

“... the shame of the thing, was evident.’ Americans reacted politically to what they saw and read. Congress passed laws that utterly changed the South, so that blacks now vote freely and hold political office – and it is a region that looks to the future instead of the past. It was an astonishing social change, and it happened in part because the press ...”

“... whose works are so thickly starred with thought. The time may come when they will be no longer read. The time will never come in which men would not grow the wiser by reading them. It was Lewis Namier who began the work of demolition. In The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, published in 1928, he cited what he called ‘the literary ...”

“... a Milord – a serious candidate for the worst translated title ever. Now, finally, we get to read it in English as Simenon’s deadpan original, The Carter of ‘La Providence’.The bluntness of the titles is matched by the jerky, syncopated texture of the writing. This is the other thing that makes it tricky to turn Simenon into English. I’ve had a ...”

“... for more than flashes of self-revelation. More recently, we have the eccentric cameos of Richard Cobb and causeries of A.J.P. Taylor, of which he said they were evidence that he had run out of historical subjects. In all, in the genre for which it seems so well designed, the craft of the historian has yielded perhaps only two classics – Gibbon’s ...”

“... which continued, Arbus told her therapist, throughout their adult lives. This may help us to read some of Nemerov’s work, including his 12-line poem ‘An Old Picture’: Two children, dressed in court costume, Go hand in hand through a rich room. He bears a sceptre, she a book; Their eyes exchange a serious look. High in a gallery above, Grave ...”

“... physical and the spiritual. ‘Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy,’ we read of a rare ‘good’ Murdoch character meditating the accusation of paedophilia a child has just levelled against him: ‘He had, or had had, more or less vague sexual feelings about all sorts of things and people, schoolmasters, girls seen on ...”

“... French writers, Camus ‘was prepared for the postwar spectacle of American racism’. He had also read Richard Wright, whose work he arranged to be translated by Gallimard. Yet in his North American diaries he has little to say about the ‘Negro Question’, other than that a Martinican employee of the French embassy, forced to rent in Harlem, had only ...”

“... supervised and impeded his every move. I believed I had heard enough about the KGB before I read this book, but the degree of petty vindictiveness and mean cunning disclosed in Sakharov’s memoirs exceeds anything I had imagined. This volume ends in December 1986 when two engineers and a KGB man came to install a telephone in the exiled ...”

“... confounded his public when, after a steady diet of Bach and Beethoven, he turned to composers like Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Grieg and Bizet, praising them to the skies and certainly above the pianistic romantics whom everyone else played. Even with Bach and Mozart, he chose tempi that defied convention and, since he played the same work differently on ...”

“... to your advancement.’ There is no written evidence to suggest that Jeffrey Archer has ever read Thomas Mann. One of the many striking aspects of his career, however, is the way in which Felix Krull’s larger view of the world has advanced it. Many older men (and at least one older woman) have been beguiled by his apparently artless energy and ...”

“... wide philosophical interest. In clarifying the distinction between the selfish gene hypothesis of Richard Dawkins and the selfish DNA hypothesis of Francis Crick, he is led into an enlightening discussion of biological reductionism. The Darwinism of Dawkins is thoroughly reductionist, in the sense that bodies are merely temporary containers for their selfish ...”

“... all this is about and it dispenses In sheeted fragments, all somewhere around But difficult to read correctly since there is No common vantage point, no point of view Like the ‘I’ in a novel. And in truth No one never saw the point of any. Tell that to Henry James. The sonnet poems of Shadow Train have something of the Jamesian absence of ...”