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“... is representative of the confused tone of the whole, being at once contradictory, camp, Pooterish, self-pitying and vindictive. After reading its melodramatic final sentence – ‘To those who will argue that many things would have been better left unsaid, I can only comment that after a lifetime of enforced silence, there is no choice other than to tell the ...”

“... suppose and admire, and upon occasion celebrate, but do not call in question or discuss.’ Thus Robert Boyle, progenitor of English science, in A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, 1686. Boyle found eight meanings for the word, and pretty much suggested we scrap the lot. No one paid him any heed. Nature is too deeply entrenched in our ...”

“... This was evident in the way the crowds behaved: the emphatic unity of the people, their creative self-organisation and improvised forms of protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline. Picture the march: thousands of men and women demonstrating in complete silence. This was a genuine popular uprising on the part of the deceived partisans of the ...”

“... Happy Moscow, was never published in his lifetime, though it now has a fine English translation by Robert Chandler. The eponymous Moscow is a woman, not the city, though she floats around it doing some characteristic 1930s-Moscow things like parachute jumping (insouciantly lighting a cigarette in mid-flight) as well as having various dead-end love affairs in a ...”

“... Suffering from crippling pains in the head and advancing paranoia, he conceived a vendetta against Robert Peel, then prime minister, bought pistols, travelled to London and, though apparently intending to assassinate Peel, fatally shot his private secretary Edward Drummond. ‘The Tories in my native city have compelled me to do this,’ he claimed in ...”

“... by conspiracy theories, the scapegoating of minorities and fanfares of purportedly democratic self-congratulation. In Turkey Erdoğan has made cunning use of actual and threatened military coups against his regime to subvert democracy, in the name of democracy.* The seemingly quotidian category of democracy, so widely recognised that it seems to need no ...”

“... treated his heroine without mercy. In The Testament of Cresseid, a sequel by the Scots poet Robert Henryson, Cresseid is reduced to prostitution and – by counsel of the gods – stricken with leprosy. Chaucer borrowed the plots of both ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and Troilus and Criseyde from Boccaccio, who was still alive during his first trip to ...”

“... St Guinefort, patron saint for the protection of children. Many sainted characters dream of bliss: Robert Browne, an 18th-century astronomer, of the young Jesus getting into bed with him; St Catherine of Siena of marrying Jesus, who gives her his foreskin for a ring (the lack of self-awareness among our pre-Freudian ...”

“... du monde (1836), Uchronie (1857) and Éternité par les astres (1872). The title of the first is self-explanatory – the book, by Louis Geoffroy-Château, is about what didn’t happen after Waterloo. Charles Renouvier’s Uchronie has precisely the opposite politics. It is ‘set … in ancient Rome to emphasise that France’s recent illiberal path had ...”

“... in the coastal village of Deià in Mallorca. There they had their second child and they asked Robert Graves to name him – Philip. ‘The Relics’, which appeared in Mathews’s first collection, The Ring (1970), is a set of variations on imaginary landscapes in yellow and red, bringing to mind the Phrygian Midas, and a landscape turning to clanking ...”

“... the transgressive power and chilly stylishness of all this (nor how close it often sails to self-parody). But it seems at least as much a ‘private vocabulary of symbols drawn … from the writer’s mind’ as it is a case of ‘analysing external fictions’. What isn’t immediately clear is whether those two ways of thinking about the novel can be ...”

“... some reputation, now long gone, in the West. Marlene Dietrich fell to her knees before him; Robert Frost, visiting Moscow in 1962, made a point of seeking him out; he was touted for the Nobel Prize. I once owned an edition of the Selected Stories (from Progress Publishers, Moscow), ransomed from Foyles; my current copy is an on-demand Dutch reprint from ...”

“... a return of sorts to the day before the meeting with Pascal, when she encountered Lucien’s uncle Robert, who may be planning something sexual for her, then a brief shower, and at last she’s off to her meeting, back in the narrative present. I wish I could say there is a reason for any of this, but I was left with the impression that Kushner had groped her ...”

“... centuries later. But then, for us, Bonfire Night was all about feeling not thinking, an atavism of self-enchantment, a ripple in time from our ancestors outfacing the cold, dark harbingers of winter with heat and light. And what better way to make light than with fireworks? Even the lid of the box was gaudily thrilling, like a fairground or circus. And beneath ...”

“... nothing at all ‘Happened’ ... This absence of the explainable beyond the renewal of the self-containedness of the image     (One could go round and round This single and Sicilian less     Than happening) gives the sequence its beautiful and tough purity, as of those ‘clear-glassed windows/The clear day looking in’ which the poet ...”