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“... of the New World, re-creates Mehta’s years at the Arkansas School of the Blind in Little Rock, which he attended from 1949 to 1952. If Vedi is the most closely focused and harrowing of the books in the series, Sound-Shadows is in many ways the most haunting, because it shows us most clearly how the author learned to manage both the fact and the idea ...”

“... had built her own Shakespearean shrine-cum-reading-room in 1742 – more than a decade before David Garrick commissioned what had previously been considered the first Temple of Shakespeare, complete with a statue by Roubiliac, for his own garden at Hampton – made me sufficiently curious to want to renew my attempt to see her former house and ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... and programmatic engagement with the ‘elemental’ – sea-voyages and disasters, islands, rock, marine biology. I wonder, too, if one critic’s ‘appeased self-knowledge’ might not be another’s ‘complacency’. In The Price of Stone (1985), for instance, given in its entirety in New Selected Poems, Murphy has several poems about the building ...”

“... there is nothing to catch anyone on the raw in the questions. They are soft and sugary. They will rock no boats and call forth no hard answers. And yet, despite this softness at its core, the novel exerts such poetic power and such pleasures of form and such potency in the final dawn scene at Curlow Creek – where all the ambiguities are left floating in ...”

“... culture to which he belongs and of the morality which enables him to sit in judgment on the very rock out of which he was hewn. He appears, however, to have missed the further irony that, by ascribing to Israel the creative power which invented their God and so became responsible for initiating the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, he ...”

“... and lions, with titles like ‘The Old Warrior’ (a lion, not a Masai). These are the work of David Shepherd and Simon Combes, who have donated reproduction fees to wild-life conservation funds. They are relevant to the text, in which the Baroness zestfully celebrates the beasts she killed, and also relevant to the tears of the moviegoers, enchanted by ...”

“... South-West (Death comes for the Archbishop), turn-of-the-17th-century Quebec (Shadows on the Rock), antebellum Virginia (Sapphira and the Slave Girl) and an unfinished novel about Avignon in the 14th century. For her the past came closer to genuine goodness, nobility and the virtues of stability, innocence and grace. The present she saw as ...”

“... or less complete. Peter Burton and Richard Smith have added chapters on film, the gay scene and rock music, for which Baker had left notes. The result is not just about drag, nor yet about female impersonation, and doesn’t even confine itself to the performing arts. Besides the contemporary pieces, Drag has fascinating material on early English ...”

“... more manacled by the observances of etiquette.’ On less grand occasions they met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part ...”

“... airport: men unthinkingly aim at them, reducing the amount of urine that ends up on the floor.David Cameron’s government, hungry for a new political idea but reluctant to rock any ideological boats, was quick to seize on ‘nudges’, along with its ‘Big Society’ vision of volunteering and social enterprise. What ...”

“... Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a smattering of Netflix scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a history of love? Or a history of certain ideas about love? As the historian of China Eugenia Lean has argued, the ‘single ...”

“... ruins; but how insignificant are the greatest of these’ compared to what had been built by ‘rock-making Polypi’. There was a paradox here too. Coral atolls are found in deep waters in the open ocean, yet the corals that compose them are shallow-water organisms. How did they form? Some writers speculated that they were little crowns on top of volcanoes ...”

“... and turn them over to make sure nothing is hidden underneath. So one day they tied a string to a rock rigged to an old water bottle with a power source inside attached to some old mortar rounds.’ Last November, I was in Fallujah, in the place where two American contractors had been shot and killed, when a ground-to-air missile, fired from date groves near ...”

“... the emergency has landed the narrator not only in hospital but within the domestic contours of a David Sedaris essay. In the new novel, one of the only references to that earlier life is the mention of a syphilis infection contracted in Eastern Europe; the doctors investigate this as one possible cause of the aortic dissection, before ruling it out. Even ...”