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“... exception that proves the rule. ‘It was that I had no gift. I had no natural talent,’ he tells Stephen Schiff in a recent New Yorker profile. ‘I had to learn it. Having to learn it, I became my own man.’ And, in A Way in the World: ‘I had had to learn to write from scratch, almost in the way a man has to learn to walk and use his body again after a ...”

“... for everyday survival to be even harder for most people than it had been in the past. Stephen Lovell’s choice of the dacha as a prism through which to look at the changes in Russian society is inspired. His book is not light reading: the story is complex and he has done a lot of research (if readers want to try something less demanding ...”

“... most intense phases of extermination in the Holocaust), this was primarily accomplished not by the small German Einsatzkommando deployed in Hungary, but by Hungarian gendarmes and officials, who saw to it that the deportations proceeded with exemplary efficiency. Hungarians carried out body searches, and inflicted beatings to extract information on the ...”

“... as the heartland of hiphop, belt buckles were used for bragging and branding. Everyone wore them, Stephen Witt writes in How Music Got Free, at the CD pressing plant in North Carolina that handled heavyweight hiphop labels such as Def Jam, Interscope and Death Row. ‘The white guys wore big oval medallions with the stars and bars painted on. The black guys ...”

“... first to point out that ‘hate away’ would have sounded to Elizabethans like ‘Hathaway’; Stephen Booth added that since the word ‘and’ was regularly pronounced ‘an’, Shakespeare may be hinting in the poem’s final line that ‘Ann saved my life.’ It’s an ingenious reading, though I’m not persuaded. Germaine Greer has no ...”

“... into English verse. Who can ever forget their first throat-gulping reaction to the scene where Stephen at last decides to reject the disciplines of church and state for the free life of the artist? Young Dedalus, who has, under the temptation to become a priest, been mortifying his flesh for a long period of doubt and torment, here gives himself up one ...”

“... of the last century. Medieval armies, it has been believed, were more or less axiomatically small, because, unlike the Romans, their rulers couldn’t organise anything bigger. That assumption is put in question by the topography of the battlefield at Hastings. The English army is known to have been marshalled along the ridge where the ruins of Battle ...”

“... NGO. DentAid’s UK operations began in 2015, providing a charitable alternative to what Stephen Armstrong calls ‘DIY Dentistry’. In a chapter that’s almost impossible to read without flinching, Armstrong tells story after story of individuals forced by the scarcity of public services and the cost of private treatment into ...”

“... make a decision, walks off, and is almost immediately lured down a large hole in the ground by a small and familiar (from Tenniel’s illustrations) white rabbit. Much well-known stuff ensues, involving falling and doors and eating and drinking and shrinking and growing, and for a while we may think this is a film of Alice in Wonderland after all. But only ...”

“... The things they carried is as powerful and precise as anything O’Brien has written. Unlike Stephen Crane or Hemingway or Mailer (to whom he has palpable debts), he cannot accommodate war within a stable vision of the horrors of human life; there is no intense exploration of the test of courage we must all face. War for O’Brien is a morbid ...”

“... Judge or Jury’s satisfaction: His Lordship, therefore, won the action. But, as the damages were small, He gave them to a Hospital. Were he writing today, Belloc’s ending might have gone: The Jury, all of whom abhorred The Daily Howl, made an award So huge it cured Lord Henry’s pain And meant he never worked again. He who steals my purse may steal ...”

“... in a force nine gale) cross the novel several times, but one never has the sense that this is a small world. Like the novel, it sprawls. Each of the leading trio of heroines has a brush with the dark side: madness, child abuse, suicide, drug addiction and murder lurk on the edge of their well-ordered bourgeois lives. Running alongside the five years of The ...”

“... which included contributions from Julian Bell, Richard Eberhart, William Empson, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, William Plomer and Lehmann himself. Through Spender he met Christopher Isherwood. The friendship with Spender from the very first seemed edgy, uncertain and uneasy, but durable for all that. Isherwood he loved, but he was tolerated, rather than ...”

“... explanation, and the powers that be will prefer it to the truth, even though they know better.’ Stephen King’s new novel, 11.22.63, combines a variety of genres, being a JFK assassination thriller, a story of time travel, a variation on the grail quest, a novel of voyeurism, a love story, a historical novel, a counterfactual historical novel, and the ...”

“... rarely calls to talk about my research. In April, however, she rang to ask: ‘Do you agree with Stephen Hawking?’ That’s usually an easy question to field. On topics ranging from the behaviour of black holes to the structure of the early universe, a safe answer is yes. But that wasn’t what my mother wanted to know. She wanted to know whether I agreed ...”