“... his life, work and influence on a variety of artists, from Marcel Duchamp to Michel Foucault, John Ashbery to Georges Perec. I recently spent several months working my way through this enormous archive in the stately gloom of the ornately carved Salon de Manuscrits on the first floor of the Bibliothéque Nationale, just down from the Bourse where Roussel ...”

“... or did it require a narrative looking beyond Gnosticism to Zoroaster? Gibbon cites three major scholars as guiding his history of the early Church: Jean Le Clerc, a Genevan exile living in Amsterdam, Isaac de Beausobre, a Huguenot exile living in Berlin, and Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, a professor in the Lutheran universities of Helmstedt and ...”

“... work of an obscure photographer she had discovered in Paris (Atget), Ralph Steiner, Paul Grotz, John Cheever, Ben Shahn and, most important of all, Lincoln Kirstein.Evans always acknowledged the role luck played in his life, and nothing could have been luckier than the friendship he formed with Kirstein, whose influence on his career was so profound that ...”

“... with another dog, Emily waded in at once while ‘several other animals,’ the Haworth stationer John Greenwood reported, ‘who thought themselves men, were standing looking on like cowards as they were.’ She forced the dogs apart, ‘dredg[ing] well their noses with pepper’ and sent them packing. When Branwell drunkenly set light to his ...”

“... took place late on the second day, once Heron had already confessed to Detective Chief Inspector John Renwick and Detective Inspector Colin Dudley, who had taken over the questioning from lower-ranking officers. You can hear them steering Heron in the direction they want him to go. When he suggests he attacked Nikki with a ‘metal bar’, they make it clear ...”

“... from virtually nowhere. Of course they were nervous at first about working with such a major retailer. But these people are the new kind of producer.’Passing the condiments aisle I saw an old man standing in front of the Oxo cubes. He looked a bit shaky. His lips were moving and he had one of the foil-wrapped Oxo cubes in the palm of his ...”

“... blow rather than the scrupulous fleck of paint. It’s as if Rodin had apprenticed himself to Gwen John, and that isn’t at all how their story played out. After The Ghost Writer Zuckerman became Roth’s stand-in of choice, in Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson, the three books being republished in 1985 as the trilogy Zuckerman Bound, with The Prague ...”

“... work of MFA graduates and/or instructors), divided into three main groups: ‘technomodernism’ (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon), ‘high cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by ...”

“... Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT. The programme has been rolled out in every major US airport, and according to a document leaked in March last year, it works on a points system: too much yawning, add one point. Whistling as you approach the screening process, add another point. A cold stare, arrogance, rigid posture all get two ...”

“... and most of the characters wear fedoras, as if they’ve wandered in from a William Wyler or John Huston film. The sets, too, ‘bear witness to my passion for the American cinema’, Melville said. The phone booth in the métro is an American one; the bar resembles a coffee shop in Manhattan; the police interrogation room, with its Venetian blinds, is ...”

“... Those who were seeking between 1919 and 1922 to establish an independent Irish state had three major concerns: to publicise abroad the struggle for Independence, to seek official recognition from other states and to raise finance, mainly in the United States. Because most of the Sinn Féin members elected in the December 1918 General Election were interned ...”

“... public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special counsel Charles Colson, and John Newton, the Anglican hymn-writer who once captained slave ships. Nazarbayev’s life story doesn’t have this trajectory. It is 19 years since he became his republic’s leader and his rise has not yet crested. You could say that by accepting the Kazakh ...”

“... But all that became memorable painting only because the same inner yearning drove Rosa to commit major graphic decisions directly to canvas. The life of his Landscapes with Hermits, with their lungeing, crashing diagonals, or of other stand-outs in the Dulwich exhibition (e.g. Jacob’s Dream, a galumphing six-footer from Chatsworth), is fairly close to the ...”

“... Madame Bovary: some translations need as long as the book itself took to write, a few even longer. John Rutherford’s magisterial version of Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta – a kind of Spanish Bovary – cost him, according to his calculation, five times as many hours to translate as it had taken Alas to write. ‘Translation is a strange ...”

“... so long as the members didn’t behave as if it was still the 1970s. The unions also remained a major source of Labour’s political energy and funding. Yet given that the UK population has risen by a tenth since Blair’s election, the subsequent stabilisation of union numbers is less impressive than it looks. In some ways, British unions have adapted to ...”