“... was earlier posed, as she acknowledged, by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov and by William James in ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’. Ishiguro’s novels pose versions of it too, if not with such immediate horror.In Never Let Me Go, for instance, the child isn’t alone, and Kathy and her companions aren’t miserable. Their lives are ...”

“... Lying in bed with a cracked rib, I have been much consoled by these genial books about Wodehouse. The only dangerous one was Wodehouse on Wodehouse, since I was compelled to laugh aloud, boyishly, provoking the old knife-in-kidney sensation. Should any other member of the Ukridge idiot school chance upon this review, after being tipped off his bike by a London omnibus, let him heed this warning, as he lies in bed with his cracked specs and cracked rib ...”

“... suspicious of those of East European origin’ and, with reference to another enemy, James Goldsmith, ‘there was also the Jewish question ... The picture emerged: Old English county society versus parvenu Middle European Jews.’ The editor of the Sunday Express (says McKay) appealed to Ingrams not to attack his own proprietor: ‘Richard, I ...”

“... of his father’s work.’ Hermann Broch managed to leave Austria in 1938, with the assistance of James Joyce. Armand had less difficulty, for his Austrian passport described him as a Catholic nobleman whose main domicile was Athens: his fiancée, Eva Wassermann, had been a dancer at the Casino de Paris in Monte Carlo, and she was one of several Europeans ...”

“... newspaper column, that secular sermonette. A lament for the well-meaning replacement of the King James Bible by more narrowly relevant versions reads like a transplanted think-piece. A passage describing the technicalities of roofing (‘with slate roof tiles your pitch can be as shallow as 33 degrees – with stone tiles you must allow 45 degrees or even ...”

“... looking at the portraits close to for such details – all the time keeping in mind things Rica Jones and Martin Postle explain in their catalogue essay, ‘Gainsborough in His Painting Room’.* For example, that he said he could not ‘without taking away the likeness’ touch a portrait ‘unless from the life’; the report from Ozias Humphry, who ...”

“... short is that quite modestly substantial ones (by the standards of Alice Munro, let alone Henry James) come to seem monumental. Two of these longer pieces, not widely separated in the book, make claim to some sort of symmetry with their titles (‘The Cows’ and ‘The Seals’), when in fact they represent opposite extremes of Davis’s dealings in ...”

“... included it on its list of Christmas picks. Other reviews deprecated the obvious influence of James and Wharton, among others. It would be easier to accept any or all of these assessments – Bevel’s outrage at a scurrilous portrait, praise for literary quality, reservations about originality – if the novel hadn’t supposedly been printed in full as ...”

“... unsupported, cantilevered over empty space.This is not the long sentence as practised by James, Proust or Mann. Their sentences were magnificently terraced earthworks, but Melchor’s are more like slow-motion mudslides. There’s no question of any surprise, a sting in the tail, the equivalent of Columbo’s ‘One more thing …’ The refusal of ...”

“... playhouses were probably closed two-thirds of the time. Biographers, notably Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jonathan Bate, have struggled to determine the impact plague had on Shakespeare’s life and work. Did Shakespeare flee London during extended outbreaks, and so spend much of the first decade of the 17th century with his family in Stratford? Did he ...”

“... favoured funds are able to charge even more: Renaissance Technologies, founded by a mathematician, James Simons, and based in East Setauket on Long Island’s affluent north shore, is reported to charge investors in its Medallion Fund a 5 per cent management fee and a 44 per cent performance fee, though I haven’t been able to confirm those figures. To stop ...”

“... Buck and his wife, Blanche, and various friends and associates (Ralph Fults, Henry Methvin, W.D. Jones) – was intensely family-minded. When they wanted to arrange a family gathering, Clyde and Bonnie would drive past the old Barrow home in West Dallas and toss out Coke bottles in which he’d stuffed messages indicating when and where to meet. Clyde’s ...”

“... two most substantial essays: Francis Huxley’s ‘Psychoanalysis and Anthropology’, Hugh Lloyd-Jones on ‘The Study of the Ancient World’. Doubtless Huxley will hate being called ‘substantial’: his style is busily flash. But he packs in more information, line by line, than any other contributor, and you finish his lecture with an enlarged sense of ...”

“... James Joyce​ resented the Second World War for distracting readers from the newly published Finnegans Wake, and what with one thing and another I’ve sometimes felt the same way, on behalf of Mark Frost and David Lynch, about the news environment that accompanied the broadcast of Twin Peaks: The Return. I say ‘on behalf of’ because I imagine that Lynch couldn’t care less ...”

“... considerations of a less starkly ultimate kind might arise in connection with the subtitle of James Knowlson’s new biography: ‘The Life of Samuel Beckett’. (The main title looks suspiciously like a publisher’s wheeze, a low-grade spin on Beckett’s desperate formula for the modern artist as doomed to fail or, more tantalisingly, as driven by a ...”