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“... to sneer. A different, more troubling argument for taking economics seriously comes from the French sociologist of science Michel Callon, in The Laws of the Market (1998). Callon argues that economics does not describe an already existing ‘economy’, but helps bring that economy into being. Economics is not a descriptive but a performative ...”

“... When John le Carré published A Perfect Spy in 1986, Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of A Perfect Spy, I’ve occasionally wondered what Roth’s generous blurb says about the postwar English novel. As a le Carré bore, however, I’ve also wondered how Roth managed to overlook Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), the central novel in le Carré’s career, in which George Smiley – an outwardly diffident ex-spook with a strenuously unfaithful wife and an interest in 17th-century German literature – comes out of retirement to identify the turncoat in a secret service that’s explicitly presented as a metaphorical ‘vision of the British establishment at play ...”

“... underestimate the tenacity of cultural stereotypes and the stale-mindedness of press writers like Philip Hensher (who twice rehashed Leavis’s line that the ‘set’ were not artists but self-publicists) and Waldemar Januszczak (‘Bloomsbury. Just tapping out these ten tedious letters has brought on a severe attack of RSI’). Yet in truth – to throw off ...”

“... of a dying town could only discuss their problems in a cloud of smoke. Richard Klein, Professor of French at Cornell, could supply Mrs Willis with a number of answers, one of them being that, in wartime, smoking keeps up ‘courage and endurance in the face of intolerably stressful circumstances’, not only because of its physiological effects – a burst of ...”

“... words – will need reminding that in the 1970s and 1980s there was no getting round the French-Bohemian (actually Moravian) novelist Milan Kundera, who was to those decades what Sebald and Knausgaard were to be for those following. There was about these authors something chic and brainy and radical: three qualities the English have on the whole ...”

“... me about Worship Street, where I lodged in the early days of Beyond the Fringe in 1961. It was a Philip Webb building (date: 1862) with a workshop on the ground floor and accommodation above, with the lease belonging to Henrietta Roberts (later Dombey), the daughter of Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. What occasioned Rupert’s interest was his having ...”

“... title sounds like a novel, and the book can and should be read like one – a very remarkable one. Philip Larkin, who had the knack of making sideways critical comments as memorable as those in his verse, remarked that ‘the first thing a novelist must provide is a separate world,’ and it is true that the world Dr Green has made out of the relationship of ...”

“... palatable to the middle classes’. The novella’s effect was all the stronger for not being – Philip Kitcher misreads it – about ‘a closet homosexual’ who has ‘refused to acknowledge his sexual inclinations’. Unlike his fully self-aware creator, who, though never a practising homosexual (‘how can one sleep with men?’ he asked in a 1950 diary ...”

“... pool of local sympathisers for it to draw on as there is in Afghanistan. The restless valley of Philip Shishkin’s title is the Ferghana Valley, which connects eastern Uzbekistan and south-western Kyrgyzstan. There have been several episodes of public unrest in the valley, all brutally repressed, but they have had more to do with ethnic tensions and local ...”

“... Herzog, self-berating and uncomfortable with his reputation like the fictionalised versions of Philip Roth. Free of the priapic obsessions of Sabbath or Portnoy or the gynophobia of Bellow’s Sammler, Humboldt or Ravelstein, Seigl is wilfully solitary, stripped of ties: ‘A big ungainly man with a curious kind of grace’. At the beginning of the novel ...”

“... Awriter​ ‘with whom I feel no affinity’: that’s how Annie Ernaux, the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, described Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française. When the 77-year-old Yourcenar entered the Académie on 22 January 1981, wearing a black velvet double-layer cape designed by Yves Saint Laurent, she looked severe, as if she had spent her life as a nun in service to literature ...”

“... the adulation was encouraged in part by James himself. Fulke Greville, whose Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney paradoxically extolled the past queen, who had done so little for his hero, in order to highlight the shortcomings of the present king, was not the recipient of royal favour. But William Camden was; his famous Annales were written with royal ...”

“... is so violent and so scatological that it still raises hackles or causes embarrassment? Why did a French cardinal encourage him to write that book? And why did that French cardinal later marry and become an Anglican? One thing is certain: those men and women – and many small men and ...”

“... Europe. The developing policy of appeasement; the ‘non-intervention’ policy of the British and French governments with respect to the Franco rebellion in Spain; the helpless feeling that the humane liberal traditions in which so many of us had been brought up were dangerously threatened: all of this had us seriously worried. It led many to believe that the ...”

“... of Jewish mothering of an intensity rarely seen outside the early works of Woody Allen or Philip Roth. A la recherche has been characterised as a semi-autobiographical novel written by a Jewish homosexual, and narrated by a Gentile heterosexual with an inordinate interest in Jewishness and homosexuality. There is some truth in this, although Proust ...”