“... Mathias Enard’s new book is a fictional account, no more than novella length, of a visit by Michelangelo to Constantinople in 1506. Sultan Bayezid II had already commissioned a design for a bridge over the Golden Horn from Leonardo da Vinci, and rejected it. Now Michelangelo, far from immune to rivalrous feelings, was being offered the chance to ...”

“... thought’ which would lead, in the 20th century, to a new kind of nationalism, fuelled not by ‘love’ and nostalgic ‘lyrics’ but by ‘hatred’ and steely ‘technics’. Breaking with the habit of a lifetime, Cassirer referred explicitly to his own experience: he had been one of those cultivated Germans ...”

“... All day​ it has rained,’ goes a poem written by Alun Lewis in 1941, while he was stationed with the Royal Engineers in Hampshire, ready for war but not yet called to action. It’s a poem about being bored and being grateful for the boredom since worse is to come. ‘We talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome ...”

“... frustrated at every turn, the target of a widespread suspicion founded in an ignorance that could be described as folkloric were the baiting about cannibalism and washing not so vicious. In her memoir she presents herself both as object and subject of her story. Both perspectives offer first-hand testimony of wrongs done and not dusted.First published in ...”

“... put it, ‘the first rustlings of Literary Theory’ – he gave it capital letters – ‘were to be heard’, and the quarrel between those who took to theory and those who took against it was just starting up. John had no doubts about which side he was on – I’m not sure he ever had doubts: he had questions – and the argument for theory was all the ...”

“... evil spirits and magical objects. The world we take for granted, the show suggested, might not be the one in which we live. Like the series from which it takes its name, Nona Fernández’s The Twilight Zone, first published in Spanish in 2016, is closer to an anthology than a traditional novel, only here the encounters aren’t with aliens or amulets but ...”

“... Bridge. This put an end to the steady progress of the Vikings from raiders to settlers to would-be conquerors: an attempted invasion by King Sweyn of Denmark three years later was abortive, and though Norwegians continued for many years to control the Scottish islands in the far North, their effect on the British mainland ...”

“... a question which has steadily become more insistent since the last general election can no longer be ducked: what price the Return of the Prodigal? How you read this question probably depends on your preconceptions. The Labour Party has won the battle of institutions, as its supporters always assured us it would. In its hour of crisis it hung on and did not ...”

“... the year in which F.R. Leavis’s Scrutiny was launched. ‘Criticism’ was no longer a word to be murmured with self-deprecation. It had become an enterprise, an undertaking, a means of finding ‘solutions’ for ‘problems’ in the present culture. In Scrutiny’s second issue, Leavis published an article that asked: ‘What’s wrong with ...”

“... bars with squatters’ rights established – is one proof of that. Never mind that they tend to be drab places: their defiant survival into the age of the Amex Gold Card is evidence of the herd instinct of the newspaper trade. That instinct remains, in some respects, surprising. Journalists, after all, come in all shapes and sizes, with an especially strong ...”

“... first at home, then in England at a preparatory school, at Malvern (for one term only), and by a private tutor. So to Oxford. It was 1917. Lewis had volunteered, and he was in effect an officer cadet, soon in ‘barracks’ at Keble. He returned to Oxford after a brief spell on the Western front, where he was wounded, and at Oxford he stayed until 1954 ...”

“... Edward VIII was only the most visible. The monarchy had already been placed under acute strain by Edward’s unkingly conduct in the few months since his father’s death – his feckless hedonism, his dangerous political naivety and his neglect of the more tedious duties of his role. His abdication – an entirely characteristic act of childish ...”

“... as the New York University Scrolls scholar Lawrence Schiffman has noted, so the rubric would be defensible only if the Eisenman and Wise interpretation were the first to qualify as ‘complete’. Then there is the question of whether many of these really are ‘key’ texts and whether they have been ‘withheld’ or rather, which strikes me as far ...”

“... It must be cause for at least mild celebration that the United States now has a Vice-President who can use the word ‘Cartesian’ in place of one who could not spell the word ‘potato’. In a chapter called ‘Dysfunctional Civilisation’ in his book Earth in the Balance, Al Gore writes that ‘the Cartesian approach to the human story allows us to believe that we are separate from the earth, entitled to view it as nothing more than an inanimate collection of resources that we can exploit how we like; and this fundamental misperception has led us to our current crisis ...”

“... Paul Auster is an amphibious writer whose eclectic methods and influences make one unsure by which end to try and grasp him. His early self-exile to an apprenticeship in Paris as a poet and translator, absorbing the lessons of the ‘high’ aesthetic rigorists – Beckett, Blanchot, Jabès, Celan – was an unexpected preliminary to his return to America and, after several years, his dark, formally self-conscious entry onto the scene of the American novel with The New York Trilogy, an elaborate anti-detective volume full of Hawthorne, Melville and Thoreau ...”