“... following in the region, of a mad and dangerous kind, which requires the crucifixion mainly of small animals, but later of babies and grown-ups too. Llosa’s technique is at full experimental stretch in weaving a convincing tangle out of the luridly coloured threads in this story of two sorts of deep human requirement getting out of hand. He strings ...”

“... favoured notion of modern sculpture – in 1926 the New Yorker published a drawing by Helen Hokinson of two toqued ladies circling a Bird in Space, shaping themselves to its undulating line. Sculpture as essence, sculpture as pure form, sculpture as a response to material, the probity of direct carving, the virtues of Egyptian hierarchy and of ...”

“... in 1816, originally as a memorial to his wife Eliza. Above the brick burial vault and within a small precinct bounded by a heavy, classicising balustrade, he placed a tall canopy (almost three metres high) of rough Portland stone, supported on plain square columns and topped by one of his characteristic shallow domes. Inside this canopy was another – a ...”

“... own pathos and dim beauty. All three show him as a boy with smooth hair and a neat coat, holding a small bouquet in well-articulated fingers. He is standing next to his seated mother, who wears an enveloping apron and a veil draped around head and neck, her empty hands rendered as two blobs on her lap. Mother and son gaze at us with intense, icon-like black ...”

“... there for Mozart as well as themselves. Wolfgang and Constanze were short of money and also had a small boy and a newborn baby to look after, but it occurred to them that Leopold, who was already looking after Nannerl’s first-born in Salzburg, might become their childminder as well. Leopold, however, resentful of Wolfgang’s independence since his move to ...”

“... to home in on. No ‘bracelets of bright hair about the bone’ here. Indeed, his one poem in Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book of English Verse contains the exquisitely execrable lines ‘And popt a question for the nonce,/To beate my braynes about’. He certainly has moments far better than this. ‘Gascoigne’s Lullaby’ is as good a set of ...”

“... external incentives seem more important than internal ones)’. To quote the actually peerless Helen DeWitt, who, when she couldn’t find a publisher for her difficult novel Your Name Here, sold PDFs of it through her website: ‘Ha ha! Ha ha!’That you can, as we say on the internet, just not occurs to Tolentino as a theoretical option but not an ...”

“... refrain from quoting them to a bewildered congregation. I once sat through a long sermon on the small matter of the ‘lacrimae rerum’. While Bishop Herlihy was very worldly in an Italian way about many issues, his worldliness did not, I think, stretch to a priest under his control wishing to measure the length of twenty boys’ penises. He simply would ...”

“... amount of pity or contempt for undergraduates as a tribe (‘They all looked the same. Like small, desperate creatures, fearful and alone in the world’) but their own position – shallowly rooted in the city, with deadlines looming for career breakthrough and/or personal fulfilment – is no more secure. This is a provisional landscape, and a group ...”

“... how much they looked like each other: the same penetrating, separated-at-birth expression, tight small mouths and grapey dark eyes.) Other famous Esther-admirers, and they were numerous, included both Fitzgeralds, the New York society hostess Muriel Draper, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Nancy Mitford, Dawn Powell, even Mary McCarthy, whose rivalrousness ...”

“... 18 he was caught stealing money from his Owens College friends, in an attempt to support Marianne Helen (Nell) Harrison, a 17-year-old alcoholic prostitute with whom he had fallen in love. A month in prison was followed by a year in the United States, a stab at journalism, a return to England, a move to London, a reunion with Nell, and a decision to write ...”

“... to as ‘the Madiba magic’. In any event, there was plenty of opportunity for reflection in that small, dank prison cell, whose only window remained walled up for 16 years. A maximum security prisoner almost totally deprived of agency, Mandela never gave up the idea that he had sovereignty over his life, and the will to make it exceptional. Thanks to Clint ...”

“... considerably complicated their task, and which Yallop darkly suggests was done because even a small quantity of blood ‘would have been sufficient for a forensic scientist to establish the presence of any poisonous substances’. Some of the Cardinals who had gathered in Rome now began to demand an autopsy – although by then the embalming fluid would ...”

“... see these acres turn to silver and gold’; and ending with an account from 1906 of a visit from Helen Keller, who pleased Twain by agreeing that he was distinguished not only for his humour, but for his wisdom. Most of what appears in the Autobiography has been published before, but generally in fragments, or abridged, or reordered, or interspersed with ...”

“... traveller’. There were happy, outdoorsy times in upper Tweeddale, the birthplace of his mother, Helen. A cultured uncle introduced him to French novels and fly fishing, and gave him a 1621 edition of Tacitus. ‘I never went to school in the conventional sense,’ Buchan wrote, ‘for a boarding school was beyond the narrow means of my family.’ But ...”