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“... Robert Altman’s Short Cuts is a long, loose-looking movie, but the looseness is an effect, carefully worked for. Plenty of themes recur throughout – insecurity, chance, rage, damage, the long, bruising war between men and women – and although there are fourteen or fifteen stories here (based on extrapolated from ten stories by Raymond Carver – the handouts and the introduction solemnly say nine stories and a poem, but the so-called poem is also a prose narrative), they are intricately stitched together, like a miniaturised Comédie humaine set in Los Angeles ...”

“... Perhaps all books are messages from other times and places, even the ones written yesterday and just down the road. But these three works by Kenzaburo Oë, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, have an unusual flavour of missives cast into the sea long ago, only now arriving on our island beach. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids was published in Japan in 1958, and is now translated for the first time ...”

“... In the old times, long before the birth of the Irish Free State, a young woman called Brigid McLaughlin went down from Derry to work in southern Donegal. Her job was to look after two children, a girl and a boy, aged nine and seven, orphans. ‘The children were beautiful,’ we are told, ‘especially the girl. She was dark, the boy was fair. They spoke Irish only ...”

“... The reviews and the hype hadn’t prepared me for Malcolm X at all. I expected it to be dull and worthy, a straight and long-winded retelling of a famous life. I found it lively, pretty dramatic, not all that much too long. It is a glossy parable of the sinner who came to virtue, found fame and power, was threatened and killed: the work, death and glorification of St Malcolm Martyr ...”

“... Céline​ was not a great admirer of Proust. He called him a ‘half-ghost’, far too preoccupied with the doings of an even ghostlier French aristocracy. For this and many other reasons it’s hard to imagine Céline enjoying the thought of their sharing a sudden posthumous literary limelight. Still, there are ways of winning even late games. When significant missing manuscripts by both writers were discovered in 2018 and 2021, the Proust trove amounted to 76 pages, published as Les Soixante-Quinze Feuillets (that was their name before they vanished ...”

“... A certain monotony characterises saints’ lives, at least when viewed from the outside, and the same goes for writers. The chosen career flattens out the visible differences. If it wasn’t for the lion who traditionally accompanies St Jerome, Italo Calvino suggests in The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), you could hardly tell him from St Augustine ...”

“... The ordinary slips away from us. If we ignore it, we lose it. If we look at it closely, it becomes extraordinary, the way words or names become strange if we keep staring at them. The very notion turns into a baffling riddle. Shall we say that the ordinary doesn’t exist, or that it exists only when we don’t look at it closely? Stanley Cavell has been thinking about the ordinary (although not only about that) for the whole of his philosophical career, and he knows the riddle inside out ...”

“... Grief has its reasons, or rather its mode of reasoning. The premises are wild, but the logic is irresistible. This is what Joan Didion means when she writes, in her title and on the page, of ‘magical thinking’: ‘thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome’. She also calls it ‘disordered thinking’, ‘delusionary thinking’, and speaks of a ‘fund of superstition’, of ‘occasions on which I was incapable of thinking rationally ...”

“... Borges said his essay ‘The Homeric Versions’ represented his first appearance as a Hellenist. ‘I do not think I shall ascend to a second,’ he added. This modest forecast was based partly, as Borges recognised, on his ‘convenient ignorance of Greek’, but his tone allows all kinds of intriguing questions to creep in. What kind of Hellenist could one be without a knowledge of Greek? Could one be one at all? How deep was Borges’s ignorance of the language? Asked once whether he knew any Sanskrit, he said: ‘Only the Sanskrit everybody knows ...”

“... From here it is possible to love Buenos Aires, if only for a moment.’ ‘Here’ is a tenth-floor apartment with a view to the river and the city in the evening. No people in sight, no politics, no struggles for power. What sort of city would you love only under these conditions, what sort of history would it need to have? Why would you think of loving it at all? As if anticipating these questions, the next sentence reads: ‘But we are not meeting because of any conceivable form of love ...”

“... It was​ an anxious, analysed time, where everything was shifting and complicated except the enduring family romance, the troublesome siblings, the failure to escape the baleful relation with mum and dad. It was a time, as Natalie Robins says in one of her wry moments, ‘when paediatricians functioned as parents, psychiatrists and book critics; when psychoanalysts functioned as judges; and when most mothers and fathers were considered slightly off course ...”

“... One​ of the inhabitants of Middle England, the title and the setting of Jonathan Coe’s last novel, part of a location that is also called ‘merrie’, ‘deep’ and ‘old’, thinks that she and others ‘might be living cheek-by-jowl in the same country, but they also lived in different universes’. The language in which these universes fail to communicate is politics, and one of the great insights of the novel is that politics is so often just that: a language and not a topic ...”

“... Jean Giono​ was closely associated with Provence. He lived there his whole life (1895-1970), scarcely travelling anywhere else. It was the setting of his many novels, and he wrote regularly of local geography and weather. And yet Walter Redfern could say, in 2010, that Giono was ‘not a regional novelist’. It’s an interesting claim and alerts us to all kinds of criss-crossing puzzles ...”

“... Flaubert’s​ L’Éducation sentimentale (1869) is rightly celebrated as a masterwork of literary realism, but it also, quite consistently, makes us wonder whether we know what realism is, or what else might be caught up in it. One of the novel’s characters, a painter, thinks the very concept is ridiculous: ‘Down with Realism! A painter needs to paint the spirit!’ It’s true that this character, a man called Pellerin, later becomes a photographer, a gesture we are invited to see as the entire defeat of everything he used to stand for ...”

“... A friend asks me how old Edward Said was when he died. I pause, do the little sum, and say: ‘He was 67, a few months older than I was.’ Then I catch the weird tense. ‘Than I am.’ Both tenses are true, of course. I’m still 67, but a piece of me is past.I don’t like to use the word ‘unbearable’ because I’m conscious that too many people are bearing what seem to be unbearable hardships every day ...”