“... bewildered those few members of the literary world who had read the book, and which had the far more important effect of commanding the attention of a nation that takes its big books seriously. The upshot was that a significant group of literate, but not professionally literary, people found themselves reading this novel, which Jill Kitson had praised as a ...”

“... though for different reasons. His intricate manoeuvres to secure the Presidency after Thomas Garrigue Masaryk’s resignation in 1935 inevitably won him many enemies. As foreign minister from 1918, his unwillingness to continue to let Czechoslovaks participate in the intervention against Soviet Russia had infuriated conservatives such as Karel ...”

“... Baptists be true to life? We may hope so. Carl Robert Pickens is occasionally called Bobby, but more often Mr Pickens, in a Dickensian, Pickwickian way. He has many problems. He has just been sacked from his job as assistant manager at the Sonny Boy Bargain Store in Tula Springs – partly because of the State of the Economy but also because he is accused ...”

“... Her sensibility is as exquisite as her conscience is rudimentary. That sensibility becomes even more refined when Morvern travels to the Mediterranean. She looks closely at beer, noting ‘the constellations of minute bubbles slipping back down the inside of the cold glass that was wet with condensation’. She tells us: ‘When I snubbed out the butt you ...”

“... at least in theory. This political accommodation of multilingualism and multiple scripts was more or less maintained in the official language policy of the People’s Republic of China, which incorporated the Roman alphabet for ethnic minority languages as well as pinyin, the phonetic notation system introduced in 1949 to transcribe hanzi characters. In ...”

“... one of its seven chapters. Others have to do with the cultivation of love affairs and pleasure more generally, and provide information for the man about town: about furnishing his home; about games, music and other arts; even about colouring his hair. There is guidance for women as well, especially those who are married and those whose profession is ...”

“... on the Lazy Susan, there were veiled allusions and exchanged glances, but only exhortations to eat more. Finally, our host, the poet Zhai Yongming (now 50, she was always known as the Most Beautiful Woman in Sichuan), with great embarrassment, broke the news: the police had cancelled the festival. Government intervention in a provincial poetry event was the ...”

“... way through his novel and the history of his times, always on the sidelines, but somehow causing more trouble than he’s aware of. Now we have an accordion player called Hemon, who features (twice) as one of the adoring crowd watching Franz Ferdinand’s progress through Sarajevo – and as Aleksandar Hemon’s possibly mythical, possibly fictional ...”

“... is confounding by design, as it was with his fellow countryman, contemporary and sometimes rival, Thomas Bernhard, and as it was with one of his finest critics, W.G. Sebald. In Essay on the Jukebox, the second volume in the series Handke has recently finished, he, or a narrator quite like him, tells of how, in writing, he moved a cypress he’d seen in ...”

“... early Middle Ages have claimed a good deal of attention in recent years, and deserve to receive more. Of several books about or inspired by Queen Emma, wife successively of Æthelræd ‘the Unready’ and Canute ‘the Great’, the best is Pauline Stafford’s Queen Emma and Queen Edith (1997), which brackets Emma with her successor, wife of Edward ‘the ...”

“... just below the crest of a ridge. It is steep. When you look up to the houses, you don’t see much more than roofs. To reach the front gates you take paths that angle up the ten-foot clay bank that was cut when the road was made. The land seems less stable than the timber-framed houses that sit like ships on a sea of clay and rotten rock that after a week of ...”

“... new form of writing will be necessary’ because the ‘swift’ scene changes on film were more effective than the ‘heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed’. In The Tenth Muse, Laura Marcus gives a lively account of the impact of moving images on a wide range of writers and critics in the first three decades of the 20th ...”

“... and publishers, by educationalists and cultural organisers; and one reflects how much cleaner and more decent it is to write for readers than for auditors. Patricia Beer might agree. But the moral she draws is different: how seldom in our time a writer gets a second chance. If you start off on the wrong foot, as she admits she did (‘I wrote as lushly and as ...”

“... Ectogenesis, and the eugenicist organisation that follows from it, stabilises society for ever: no more war; no more social struggle; no more progress. This, essentially, is the donnée of Brave New World. What made that book a bestseller, initially, was its frankness about sex (I can ...”

“... The British book trade is experiencing change more drastic than anything it has undergone since the 1890s. What is happening – something that can loosely be called deregulation – will undo the controls on free trade that were installed in the 1890s by the then newly-formed publishers’ and booksellers’ associations ...”