“... in its religious anomaly, the Syrian Christians who claim descent from the Brahmins converted by Thomas, the doubting Apostle. Our chief literary image of the South has come from the pastoral fables of R.K. Narayan, and it’s refreshing, too, that The God of Small Things makes no attempt to repeat them. Ayemenem’s caste rivalries are fierce and nearly ...”

“... with the right promptings, the individual imagination could rush, expand, unfurl and luxuriate. More specifically, it has incited in Western audiences the mixture of fear and fascination which sells books. In 1822, Thomas De Quincey (who had never been further east than Blackfriars, though he once met a Malay in the Lake ...”

“... questions are explicitly discussed. I take first, however, a novel which this drawing fits in a more simple and literal way. John Kennedy Toole was dead some years when A Confederacy of Dunces appeared, having, so the Foreword records, killed himself in depression at his failure to get the book published. One cannot think him wrong to have despaired, when a ...”

“... Gospels could be grafted onto the original stock: the reverse process is very hard to envisage. More important is the difference in objective. What these writers are interested in is ‘the secrets of the Universe’, not the life or even the teaching of the earthly Jesus. As Professor Pagels points out, it was the spiritual being, the risen Christ known in ...”

“... in the Lost City, let alone a Patrick-Duffy-lookalike sub-species of homo sapiens, but it must be more than a coincidence that they discovered something deep under the Atlantic that looked to them like a ‘lost city’ in a place known as ‘Atlantis’. Perhaps some time from the ninth to the seventh century BC, some ancient Phoenicians had got blown adrift ...”

“... The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities – personal relations – is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Even (or especially) romantic love is ...”

“... never actually learns how to drive. It comes after a series of stories written in progressively more complicated styles – from the Kafka-like ‘Roulette Player’ to the shifting subjects and conflated genders and genres of ‘The Twins’ and ‘REM’ – that demonstrate the breadth of Cărtărescu’s aesthetics. Born in 1956, he’s a member of the ...”

“... eminently readable 772 pages. Some critics (mostly academic, perhaps) will lament the lack of more contextual information, but Morris is a marvellous storyteller. His attention to the nation that Roosevelt was transforming could have been more nuanced, but his Teddy, after whom the cuddlesome bears are named, is larger ...”

“... More than​ a hundred years ago new technologies transformed the aesthetic field, as painting and sculpture were pressured by photography and film, and modernists like Walter Benjamin and László Moholy-Nagy redefined literacy as the ability to read both. For Benjamin, the reproducibility of these media not only shattered the auratic power of the unique work (this was mostly wishful thinking) but, in doing so, opened artistic practice to other purposes, especially political ones (this came to pass, for good and for bad ...”

“... going so far as to pretend that it does not exist, an approach not invariably successful. The more sophisticated, frequently more courageous, have discovered in boredom a subject of intense interest; but of course part of the excitement has to do with the contest between the writer and his cunning antagonist, together ...”

“... is known by name to many but has seldom been reprinted or discussed. Histories of literature say more about an earlier James Thomson (1700-48) who wrote The Seasons and ‘Rule Britannia’ and got into Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, though Johnson says his diction was ‘florid and luxuriant ... and sometimes may be charged with filling the ear ...”

“... that in a lecture on Jacobitism I whitewashed the reputation of ‘Butcher’ Cumberland. More perplexing, however, was the irritation of a mature Roman Catholic student who came from the Lanarkshire rustbelt to the east of Glasgow, where sectarian tensions have outlived the heavy industries in whose cultures they once thrived. Simply by calling the ...”

“... Wittgenstein, this is the difference between working out what people are using words to do in a more or less shared family life and being a metaphysician living in a world (or a system) of your own making. After the lapidary assertions of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is more domestic, ...”

“... though he didn’t make the most successful film made according to Dogme principles, which was Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen – wasn’t really a vow of chastity but of poverty, since any film made according to the principles would come in cheap. Disowning the kitsch manipulativeness of Hollywood style was a strategic way of claiming the moral high ground ...”

“... in the world, and it is widely envied for exactly that reason. All of which makes it even more surprising that in the last ten years, two companies in the DAX, the stock-market index of Germany’s thirty (now forty) biggest corporations, have experienced colossal implosions, caused by fraud. For one of them, it was a near-death experience; for the ...”