“... The isolation of the farm only sharpened Updike’s work ethic: there was nothing else to do but read (Wodehouse, Thurber, Perelman, Hemingway), write and draw. His talents, he wrote, ‘developed out of sheer boredom those two years before I got my driver’s licence’. As a teenager he was, in his words, ‘skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be ...”

“... back to Leeds. So now in the evenings, after we’d finished our Russian lessons, I started to read for a scholarship again, biking in along Trumpington Road to work in the Cambridge Reference Library, a dark Victorian building behind the Town Hall (gaslit in memory, though it surely can’t have been), where George III was about to make his second ...”

“... jumps were new. She’d always made her mind ours too. When we were teaching my little brother, Richard, to talk, to say ‘ta’ for a proffered rusk, my mother would stop me and my other brother, George, from speaking. We all knew what he was supposed to say, but if Richard was ever going to learn, we had to stay ...”

“... Who now, other than historians of modern France, remembers Richard Cobb? Cobb’s Wikipedia entry – the canonical index of posterity’s interest – measures three lines; by contrast, Hugh Trevor-Roper, his principal addressee in this collection, gets five thousand words. Yet Cobb, who died in 1996, was not only a historian of acknowledged genius ...”

“... I would guess, Richardson’s Clarissa, where a coffin is used as a writing desk. Melville had read Spenser before he took up, in early 1849, a close study of Shakespeare (‘if another Messiah ever comes,’ he then wrote to a correspondent, ‘’twill be in Shakespeare’s person’). He found in the plays precedents for the rhetorical overreachings of ...”

“... Just doing their job. There aren’t too many significant resemblances between Pynchon and Richard Powers – Powers’s imagination is deeply invested in the local and in Pynchon the local is always about to become something else – but the passage about the Line and the Good finds an interesting and no doubt unintended commentary in The Echo ...”

“... Richard Feynman was one of the élite group of American and British physicists who developed atomic weapons with the Manhattan project in the Second World War. He flashed back into the public eye in 1965, when he won a share of the Nobel physics prize, and again two decades later when his formidable presence on the committee inquiring into the crash of the Challenger space shuttle forced the cause of the disaster into the open ...”

“... down in the light of broad day. His assassin was murdered on camera while in maximum security. Richard Nixon’s intimates fed high-denomination dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank ...”

“... this or that physical attribute, or name, or occupation, or address. Readers familiar with Richard Ellmann’s biography of 1959 will be disappointed. Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the first surviving child of John and May Joyce, whose recent marriage had been fiercely opposed by both sets of parents. Their first baby, named after ...”

“... with the religious system (variously Jewish or Christian) in conjunction with which it has been read. In the last few years literary critics have been engaged on what many of them see as a raid on the treasured possessions of the theologians. They have, they would say, taken the Bible out of this charmed circle and rediscovered its literary power. They have ...”

“... is not explained in The Queen’s Knickers, which is a perfectly Queen-friendly book. It can be read as a variant on ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, except that it’s much less contemptuous: the attitude is indulgent, though, rather than awe-struck. The two books under review approach their subject from opposite corners. Kenneth Harris trudges ...”

“... theories will believe that. And if you don’t believe in them, why would you see the movie or read the book? Well, you might enjoy conspiracy theories as fictions or metaphors, you might even enjoy the sight of fictional conspiracies as metaphors for real ones. But that thought seems . . . er . . . heretical. In all the clutter of failed controversy ...”

“... structured performance that allows no room for irony or metaphor. As Verghese says, ‘I had read through the chart and had understood the medical elements of the case. But the story of this couple was not there.’ Somehow he has rediscovered his ability to touch the lives of the people he cared for. What he doesn’t always do is develop ideas from ...”

“... clearly on the map, debates their pros and cons with subtlety and sophistication, and should be read by anyone interested in the calamitous and ultimately exterminatory path taken by German history in the 20th ...”

“... them to diminish the hopes belonging to that far better life to which this is only the entrance. Read one way, letters like this one take us back to the Faraday of his first biographers – humble, contented and hopeful of a future state, both for his soul and for his science. We may, however, prefer to see in it a different story about the fate of ...”