“... that tense and gender.If​ you think you know what the 17th-century poet Anne Southwell means by referring to Minerva’s owl, you are probably wrong. Southwell is alluding to Ovid’s story of a jealous crow, who worries that the owl has usurped his position as Minerva’s favourite. The owl is Nyctimene, a princess who was raped ...”

“... West? Rancho El Paradiso?) Dear Pos: How the hell are you? A stupid damned question as you will be rolling along pretty much as always, my reliable friend. You will be surprised to get a letter from me but not half as surprised as Papa is to be writing a letter. I have not written a ...”

“... lost nothing of its perennial fascination. All three grapple with the conundrum forcefully posed by Frye: ‘Why does this huge, sprawling, tactless book sit there inscrutably in the middle of our cultural heritage like the “great Boyg” or sphinx in Peer Gynt, frustrating all our efforts to walk around it?’ All three agree that it is fiction, but when ...”

“... By a considerable coincidence there are now published within a short interval the first biographies of two substantial Victorian literary figures, over a hundred years after the death of either man. The coincidence is made more striking by the similarities between George Henry Lewes and John Forster ...”

“... it appeared Alan Turing was not very well-known; his genius was of a kind that is not likely to be spread abroad. An immense amount of work has gone into this book, which expresses profound, and sometimes almost obsessional, admiration. It is not hagiography, but rather a study of a hero, an intellectual hero. I found it continuously readable and ...”

“... every aspect and period of America’s past’. No one who knows his earlier writings is likely to be surprised by its strengths and weaknesses. For better or worse, A History of the American People is vintage Johnson. Johnson proudly asserts that he makes no effort to ‘conceal’ his ‘opinions’. What this means is ...”

“... a new, abrupt and plangent voice to put it over. Besides, Babel witnessed the last battles ever to be fought on horseback and with sabres. Mounted nurses – ‘all whores, but comrades, whores because they’re comrades’ – rode with the Cossacks, while bombs dropped from American planes defending the newly created Polish republic. Their commander was ...”

“... picture, The Empty Chair. This image of the vacant authorial throne conveys a sense that there can be no successor to Dickens. Together with the irreparable loss, Fildes’s confident entry into the sanctum sanctorum, the study in the chalet at Gad’s Hill, confirmed the delusive intimacy which reading publics yearn to ...”

“... calmly became New Orleans, and Nieuw Zeeland New Zealand. Just how odd this practice was can be seen from the fact that although Arabs settled, and sometimes set up statelets, all round the perimeter of the Indian Ocean, and speakers of various Chinese dialects spread all over South-East Asia during the same period (say, 1500-1800), we find no traces of ...”

“... was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was. I spent long hours in the Church of San Salvatore in Venice, in the Louvre, in the Guggenheim Museum, coaxing a picture into life. I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-...”

“... for this year’s Booker Prize judging. There were some that did not of course, and they came to be recognised and greeted as a spot of relief. But no wonder there seems to be an impasse on the fiction counters today. Whoever still buys and reads ‘serious’ novels would presumably prefer to ...”

“... dismissive view of the domestic transvestite; a curious need to take up what seem to me now to be quite inappropriate moral attitudes and to make negative value judgments ... All this reticence gave the book an oddly solemn tone with little sense of the anarchic fun that drag creates. Baker tells us that, in 1968, he hoped to make his subject more ...”

“... supposed to work the trick. A long time ago, this media ritual passed the point at which it could be called self-satirising, and became instead a ludicrous and embarrassing chore. The reading and viewing and listening public would not notice if this non-event went uncovered, and the media would be glad to ...”

“... after the commitment of American ground troops in 1965 and ended in the capture of the South by Communist forces in 1975. Yet this postcolonial history, and the degree of support enjoyed by the Vietnamese Communists, makes little sense unless one knows something about the earlier period, which is the subject of this ...”

“... until the usherette sent for the manager ... She thinks of a man who was in a promising way to be fat one day. For now he makes do with a curve of the jowl, a faint trace that time will roll out in flesh. Around his lips there is a gloss of oil. He has always just finished eating spaghetti. And not cheap dried macaroni either. He has a pasta machine in his ...”