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“... photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog-banks.’ A brief chronology, inserted before the first chapter, might have been useful; it helps to have some names and dates to hand. Schrödinger received his doctorate in 1910, after completing his military service, but was called up again in the Great War, in which he served with distinction as an artillery ...”

“... if at all, in equally essentialist terms, as the Oriental mystic who taught Americans to do yoga. Ruth Harris, who confesses that she has never taken to yoga, argues that both representations miss the point. Vivekananda might have styled himself as an avatar of timeless Eastern wisdom, but he was a creature of steam trains and ocean liners. In the years ...”

“... Forties is wholly edited by Leon Edel, who says in his Preface that this decade, at any rate the first half of it, is pretty scrappy so far as journal entries go, and it has to be said that the whole collection does Wilson no good whatsoever: which, considering his genuine importance, is a pity. Wilson wrote incessantly, but his income was entirely derived ...”

“... had started to write commentaries on Greek poems as early as the fourth century BC. In the first place, a commentary on an ancient text must explain the meaning of the words. But a commentary need not be narrowly linguistic, like that expounded by the Victorian schoolmaster who began the term by saying to his sixth form, ‘Boys, you are about to enjoy ...”

“... But Tory MPs should be wary of putting too much faith in myths about political change in Britain. First past the post electoral systems do often produce strong majorities, but in the 21st century significant shifts have been preceded by hung Parliaments: an element of stickiness persists in the system. Tories can take more comfort, perhaps, in the sense that ...”

“... Monica Youn’s​ fourth book of poems, From From (Carcanet, £14.99), is her first to dwell at length on her Korean American background, and on the history of Asian America more generally. It’s also her first to rely primarily on long prose poems, or lyric essays, advancing sparely perspicuous, caustically disillusioned arguments about myth and history, cravings and reactions, racial distinction and white supremacy ...”

“... from the modernist avant-garde. Yet, after McEwen’s death, Douglas Hall, the pioneering first keeper of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, reflected that ‘paradoxically’ his choice of subject had made McEwen ‘most truly an artist of his time. For while a good many artists could work in these idioms of modernism, none could paint an ...”

“... and true-crime writer Curt Gentry, is a police and courtroom procedural, with no shortage of first-person heroics (‘During my cross-examination of these witnesses, I scored a number of significant points’); the first corpse is discovered on page six. No one is murdered in Guinn’s book until page 232. He brings a ...”

“... turned kinky, a reminder not only of her husband’s ‘black blood’, but her own. Chester’s first exposure to the American race war took place inside his own black family. In 1923, the family suffered a catastrophe that Chester would remember as its foundational trauma. They were living in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where Joseph had taken a job at Branch ...”

“... Achille Mbembe’s​ On the Postcolony, first published in French in 2000, changed the direction of postcolonial studies. Since then, he has gained a loyal readership across the political spectrum (his admirers include Emmanuel Macron and Judith Butler), and his concepts – the postcolony, necropolitics, Afropolitanism and more – crop up everywhere from the Venice Biennale to newspapers and advertising briefs ...”

“... Baedeker’s Italy, Baedeker’s France. In a sense, all Desai’s novels are Baedekers. With Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, she is the best of guides to what it’s like to be Indian, and maybe that is because she is half-German – Prawer Jhabvala is Indian only by marriage, and Polish by birth. It is usually foreigners who write guidebooks, and their access to ...”

“... Alice Sebold’s first novel, The Lovely Bones, was on its 11th US printing by the end of the summer and was sitting at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, a place usually reserved for Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy. The book’s success is a categorial surprise, since literary novels hardly ever reach a mass audience in America; but its subject-matter is so perfectly resonant with the tenor of the times that its appeal is transparent ...”

“... Revolutionary assemblies had poor acoustics. Then there was the matter of his timidity. When he first emerged on the French political scene, in the spring of 1789, he said that he ‘trembled like a child’ before each intervention. Many would have felt the fear, but few would have admitted to it. He was easy to shout down. His accent was provincial, his ...”

“... Nevertheless, he retains pleasant memories of his childhood. World’s Fair is a novel told in the first person (with some interpolations from other family members) by Edgar. Edgar’s birthday is 6 January 1931, and the narrative covers the first nine years of his life, largely spent in a house on Eastburn Avenue. His ...”

“... Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and which still alive. Bad questions have been gradually set aside ...”