“... is the nearest that Roussel’s writing ever comes to entering the inner world of another person.) Mark Ford is alive to the idiosyncratic nature of Roussel’s ‘self-evident uniqueness’ and ‘unassailable self-referentiality’, just as he is aware of the dangers of seeking to contextualise or even to ‘understand’ Roussel’s work, rendering it less ...”

“... a child at school for the first time, the sheer ineptitude, as though you’ll never learn to mark out your own space. It’s doubly shaming – shaming to remember as well, to feel so sorry for your scabby little self back there in small people’s purgatory. The only writer I know of who has done justice to the experience is a science fiction ...”

“... Arafat based himself in Jordan. It was there that his revolution achieved its high-water mark in March 1968. At the Jordanian village of Karameh – ‘dignity’ in Arabic – Arafat and his Palestinian commandos achieved a moral victory similar to that of the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive of the same year. Said Aburish writes of Arafat’s ...”

“... sun had dried it to a dusky goldbeater-skin film, cracked lozengewise by the heat; and as the wind rose, each lozenge rising a little, curled up at the edges as if it were a dumb tongue.’ This is very ‘Martian’, with its intent observation of the surface of things, its reliance on the slightly shallow brilliance of simile as opposed to the deeper, more ...”

“... layout. Its paragraphs are substantial and sometimes enormous, occasionally passing the five-page mark though never the ten. The withholding of a pause on the page, a symbolic breathing space, is an indispensable aspect of some writers’ rhetorical equipment, part of the way they impose their vision. In novels by Bolaño (By Night in Chile) or Bernhard ...”

“... William Archer wrote, ‘for illness has neither tamed his mind nor aged his body. It has left its mark, however, in the pallor of his long oval face, with its wide-set eyes, straight nose, and thin-lipped, sensitive mouth, scarcely shaded by a light moustache, the jest and scorn of his more ribald intimates.’ No writer of the Victorian period has had more ...”

“... audience’s sense of a forested landscape. Philip Henslowe’s list of stage properties for the Rose Theatre included a ‘bay tree’, ‘Tantalus’ tree’, and a ‘tree of golden apples’. In plays such as Lyly’s Galatea, Barton writes, ‘an entire woodland region’ seems to have been suggested by a single tree – the ‘fair oak’ situated at ...”

“... of the Venetian patriciate. According to him, the open book held by the winged lion of St Mark ‘is really a palimpsest’. ‘Beneath the official inscription, Pax tibi Marce, evangelista meus, can be discerned the real and enduring slogan of the Venetian Republic, Dayla, dayla, or “Gimme, gimme!”.’ According to Queller, the difference between ...”

“... is that drives specialists in the genre to pursue certain titles down to the last distinguishing mark on the cover. (If, for example, you own a first edition of Elinor Brent-Dyer’s The School at the Chalet with a bit torn off the dust-jacket, you will likely be prepared to pay the earth – up to £100, according to Joseph Connolly – for an intact ...”

“... Surrealist influence – his friendship with André Breton in the late Forties left an indelible mark on his poetry – is evident in the visionary intensity of the language. But despite its oneiric strangeness, the poem describes a purposeful quest for a fullness of being which time routinely denies the poet except for intermittent epiphanies granted him in ...”

“... is commissioned to write an article for a Sydney editor. He tells her his paper’s circulation rose when he ran a supplement on male homosexuality: ‘This is the second gay capital of the world after San Francisco... It started as a prison, maybe they retained the habit.’ Lillian likes the pock marks on his bluish jowls, and tries to ‘gain the erotic ...”

“... will do well to remember the fate of their ancestors. Stubbsian and Namierite interpretations rose because they accurately discerned certain aspects of the story; they fell because they turned these partial understandings into imaginary pictures of the whole. If today we want to know what Parliament did rather than was talked of as doing, if today we mean ...”

“... and the raising from the mud of the Thames, later that year, of Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose. A common significance could be attached to both events: an ancient seafaring people, Churchill’s island race, were recovering some long-buried aspect of their identity. Wright is a brilliant analyst of cultural meanings and has uncovered, with much ...”

“... physical traces: the scent of violets in the pantry; a pool of water by the window; a small round mark, like a cigarette burn, on the carpet. Others offer protection or bring gifts. In ‘Patricia Lake’, a friend describes a visitation from his long-dead mother, who appears one night in his Upper East Side apartment: ‘It had a platform bed and she was ...”

“... Yeats’s ‘Cast a cold Eye/On Life, on Death./Horseman, pass by!’ or Rilke’s (translated) ‘Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy/of being no one’s sleep under so many/lids’, the sheer peevishness, the withdrawal, the implicit self-adulation, the up-yours-even-unto-the-elbow-and-from-beyond-the-grave of these great souls, Heaney’s (I don’t know what ...”