“... We need only look at a single page of this book or of any of his novels after Voyage au bout de la nuit – the exclamation marks like spittle or gunfire, the ellipses forbidding us to catch our breath – to be reminded that Céline looks, and sounds, like no other novelist. In Normance the voice erupts at the highest decibels: ‘my voice! my ...”

“... the composer. Reviewing his years with Stravinsky on Radio 3 a few months ago he sounded like a man whose nerves had been permanently shattered, fully justified in his complaint, in the Preface to the first Chronicle, that ‘recorders of the sayings of the eminent are a hapless breed, more abused than thanked for their labours, which in any case seldom ...”

“... Civil Service advisers and got out of his car to talk to a group of unemployed demonstrators. One man, quite articulate, looked dreadfully thin and ill. He had a nice brindle greyhound on a leash, but it looked miserable too. Gravely I listened. At intervals I asked them questions. I told them that if there was no ‘demand’ no one could afford to pay them ...”

“... Once the most celebrated intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre had, until quite recently, almost faded from view. He was already being attacked for his ‘blindness’ about the Soviet gulags shortly after his death in 1980, and even his humanist Existentialism was ridiculed for its optimism, voluntarism and sheer energetic reach ...”

“... temporal series with the former’. The contradiction is neatly exemplified in the epigraph of Paul Boyer’s book by the hymn ‘When the Roll is Called up Yonder’: When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, And time shall be no more, And the morning breaks eternal bright and fair. If the end of time is unimaginable and the angel cannot bring history ...”

“... he was nominated by the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, to a baronetcy as the representative man of letters at the same time as Herschel was nominated as the representative man of science. His attempts to attain a peerage were for many years frustrated by his wife, who behaved after their separation with the ...”

“... in 1968, remains exceptionally hard to find in this country. Now the second collection, Points de Repère, issued in France in 1981 (revised 1985), is available, in a rearranged format with a translation by the late Martin Cooper, under the title Orientations. It is a pity that we do not have both collections freshly to hand, for any consideration of ...”

“... biography of Strachey published twenty years ago. Thomas told us much more about Strachey the man (cricket, tennis, adoring family, etc) than about Strachey the socialist. This is perhaps because Thomas was wrestling with his own flight from socialism, which was consummated in 1979 with his appointment as chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies. These ...”

“... War. Early in the novel its hero, Rupert Birkin, rides into London on a train feeling ‘like a man condemned to death’, and the narrator tells us that ‘his dislike of mankind, of the mass of mankind, amounted almost to an illness.’ What the narrator does not tell us – what needs the whole book for an answer – is how that illness should be ...”

“... resolved in his late teens to quit the hotel-management course he was taking in his native Isle of Man and become a professional photographer. His head had been turned by Cartier-Bresson’s 1954 image of a small boy hefting two large wine bottles, which he spotted in the pages of Paris Match. For a while, Killip pursued a career on strict 1960s Bailey-Blowup ...”

“... and he left behind a wife and three children to whom he was passionately devoted. Here was a man who had died too young and whose sense of duty to his party and his nation had been seen to cost him his life. Secondly, as every one has remarked, Berlinguer was very much an exception in the world of Italian ...”

“... In 1957, Louisette Ighilahriz, a member of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria, was captured by French paratroopers. She was tortured and repeatedly raped. Until a French Army doctor arranged for her to be transferred to hospital and then to prison, her only hope was that her guards might be careless enough to leave her with the means of killing herself ...”

“... as well as pejoratively, especially when qualified by the adjective ‘cute’– ‘That man’s such a cute hoor he’d build a nest in your ear.’ Dolan expands on the use of the word hoor with a range of examples from the writings of Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Friel, Tim Pat Coogan, Oliver St John Gogarty, Neil Jordan and Hugh Leonard. It’s a ...”

“... consensus. Impressively bleak though it was, Houellebecq’s first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), was not of a size or reach to give one to think that he might next go on to write something with the philosophical ambitions of Les Particules élémentaires. The earlier book – now translated under the sadly throwaway title of Whatever ...”

“... circumstances and was buried under a concrete slab in the palace, was also dug up, and the old man at last given a funeral. Soon the prison was full once again. The EPRDF government preferred to intern political opponents outside the city, and used Alem Bekagn mostly for common criminals. Its gates still gazed grimly across the shallow valley towards the ...”