“... moments in these novels. ‘Our tears are always young,’ he thinks, after a depressing visit to Ruth, who is now old (he no longer sees Ruth, but suspects she may have borne him a daughter). Or, feeling lost in space, as he sometimes does, he thinks of ‘what souls must feel when they awaken in a baby’s body so far ...”

“... But the New Yorker advertising department was far from his only target. ‘L’Lapse’, his first piece for the magazine, is a pastiche of the stylised dialogue of Antonioni’s hit movie L’Eclisse, but the joke is less on the filmmaker than on the reviewers, and their strenuous efforts to make sense of it. The protagonists are critics as well as ...”

“... who edited Vogue and later gave her advice on clothes, was astonished when she met Woolf for the first time and ‘she appeared to be wearing an upturned wastepaper basket on her head. There sat this beautiful and distinguished woman wearing what could only be described as a wastepaper basket.’ When she was photographed for Vogue Woolf wore a dress that ...”

“... When he celebrates Winsor McKay, the creator of the newspaper strip ‘Little Nemo’ in the first decades of the century, he writes: ‘McKay and I serve the same master, our child selves.’ But Sendak also criticises McKay for concluding Nemo’s story with his growing-up: ‘Nemo exchanges childhood for manhood, never thinking he might have ...”

“... sent in the Army, would she have sent the soldiers in unarmed, or with orders not to fire, in the first instance? Of course not. To know exactly what a British government would do, one need look no further than Hong Kong in spring 1989. In late May, a sixth of its population twice marched for democracy, and they meant democracy in Hong Kong as well as ...”

“... victim’s job. Treachery and self-aggrandisement were part of the natural order of things in what Ruth Dudley Edwards, in this double biography of Cudlipp and King, comically describes as the glory days of Fleet Street. The two men had very little in common. Cudlipp, the youngest son of a travelling salesman, received his formal education in local authority ...”

“... condition. In European music, the figure of Ariadne encapsulates this tradition. Her family, the first family of Crete-her father, King Minos, was one of Europa’s children by Zeus – provided the prime material; and the first composer to use the image on stage was Euripides in the late fifth century BC. Euripides sent ...”

“... bear, and we marvel at it, because it calmly refuses to destroy us. Every angel is terrible. First Duino Elegy, my translation There is also the effect of simplicity in extreme difficulty, the tone of one who has found advice in a place where the very idea of advice seems dead: Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the ...”

“... Philip Larkin​ ’s ‘Church Going’, when I read it first, came as a relief. For once, someone had said something true, or almost true, about religion and its shadowy aftermath. The poem seemed to have a lovely assuredness and finality. The self-deprecating voice – resigned and a bit sad – was having an argument with no one ...”

“... took ownership of his farm with 32 slaves in 1784, but it wasn’t until 1795 that he took the first steps to set them free, despite this being the decade when the British anti-slavery movement began to attract widespread public support. He was hardly a paragon of anti-slavery purpose.Politicians are not historians. Nor are spokesmen for ...”

“... in being written by an author susceptible to the glamour in ill-fated associations. Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell’s alter ego, has written her second enthralling novel: A Fatal Inversion is about the fatal convergence of some more or less unlikeable young people, during the sweltering summer of 1976. The novel opens, in the present, with an episode involving ...”

“... and Enríquez returned to the US in 1927, and soon separated (divorce was also bourgeois). Their first daughter, Santillana, died of diphtheria shortly before her first birthday; their second, Isabetta, was taken back to Havana by Enríquez and raised by his family. Shortly after this, in August 1930, Neel had a ...”

“... Even the stones speak Hebrew,’ the Yiddish poet Yosef Papyernikov complained in 1949. He first visited the Jewish homeland in 1924, then returned briefly to Poland, where he was born, before settling in Jerusalem. Like other supporters of Yiddish, he condemned the Zionist insistence on Hebrew as the official language of the new Jewish state ...”

“... Wolfe lecturing his secretary-bodyguard Archie Goodwin, in Rex Stout’s Fer-de-Lance (1934), the first of the series: Must I again remind you, Archie, of the reaction you would have got if you had asked Velázquez to explain why Aesop’s hand was resting inside his robe instead of hanging by his side? Must I again demonstrate that while it is permissible ...”

“... After the First World War Germany was compelled by the victorious Allies to accept full responsibility for the war, and in consequence to pay all the costs. In spite of the work of Fritz Fischer and his associates, few historians would now claim that this was fair. To the German people at the time it seemed outrageous ...”