“... insisting that the narrator has been there before, a sign that he’s confusing him with his son, Max.Max is another classmate of the narrator’s. He is now a lawyer in Los Angeles and has a daughter called Emmie, who’s around the same age as Eva. In the novel’s brief second section we learn that Thomas has died and ...”

“... that crime fiction is only crime fiction. The Lemur, his third book under the pen name Benjamin Black, is a slim, efficient novel, elegantly done as such things go, in which literary pretensions are largely resisted and the proper conventions observed. There is the murder. There is the Beretta. There are multiple suspects. There is the CIA connection. There ...”

“... His early achievements in logic and mathematics became known to the British mathematician Max Newman, and to the great John von Neumann in Princeton. He already speculated simultaneously on the foundations of mathematics, in Hilbert’s and Gödel’s sense, and on the conceivable capacities and limits of computing machines, and this combination of ...”

“... the writer, uses the pseudonym William Wilson, who himself writes about the improbably named Max Work, and is mistaken for Paul Auster, ‘of the Auster Detective Agency’. (The ‘Auster’ character always gets the smartest lines in the story, being allowed, for example, to expand on his pet theories about Don Quixote and the ...”

“... cargoof appoggiaturas, mordents, sarabandes, gavottes and trills,along with Domenico Zipoli in his black cassock, lately of Rome, Florence, Bolognaand Naples, scene of his famous contretemps with Scarlatti, père.A white miasmic vapour covers the river and forest until burning off midday.Large clumps of water-hyacinths and water-lilies floating by,seething ...”

“... than the other Eagle Lake inhabitants who populate Barry Hannah’s new novel. They include Max Raymond, a melancholy saxophonist looking for a vision of God; Byron Egan, a preacher and ex-biker, tattooed on the cheek with a Maltese cross and given to injecting himself with holy water at the pulpit; Melanie Wooten, a beautiful widow in her seventies ...”

“... immaculate finish. Fashion, like architecture, shapes materials to protect us. Take W23: long black silk dress with button-down sides. It hangs straight; the long rows of small, black, almost-touching buttons that hold it together – like, but also very unlike, Versace’s gold safety pins – reveal almost nothing. It ...”

“... same principle do hens take dust-baths. As a result her hair is fine but faded, a dry umbrella-black. Her skirts and dresses she mostly buys in brooch-like shops in suburbs and small towns. As for her physical measurements, Celia would not mind my telling that she is five foot four on her naked soles. Her sectional dimensions, though, I shall not ...”

“... field). The South Africans have meddled, because Mugabe to them is the Antichrist and a successful black government cannot be endured, least of all on the north bank of the Limpopo. But it wasn’t Pretoria’s mischief that caused Zimbabwe to split open along the fundamental tribal divide of Shona and Ndebele, as everyone forecast though many deceived ...”

“... scholar of British and French colonialism who teaches at Bath Spa University – became the first black woman to be appointed to a chair in history at a UK university, and only the second black academic (the first was Hakim Adi, who teaches the history of Africa and the African diaspora at the University of ...”

“... her; her grooming consisted of Pond’s Cold Cream, a spritz of L’Air du Temps and a dab of Max Factor’s Truly Fair Crème Puff. Still, when judging others, she clung to the old rules: top lid, good; lower lid, bad. Given how fierce and how conservative our ideas about looks and personal hygiene tend to be, the growth of the global beauty industry ...”

“... madcap elder sister Madge once came down to dinner at Cheadle Hall ‘dressed as a cricketer, in black breeches, cricket cap and shorts’. Even while boggling at Ms Morgan’s conception of a cricketer’s normal attire, one realises that she hasn’t addressed herself to the really important question: how on earth did Madge manage to get her shorts on over ...”

“... Alexander reminded me that Black once said that he was prepared to let his editors have a completely free hand except on one subject. He forbade attacks on American Presidents in general and President Reagan in particular. Entry for 18 April 1986, Not Many Dead The success of Michael Moore’s film about Roger Smith and General Motors has aroused an envious spirit of emulation in my breast ...”

“... National Gallery in Washington, the painter Oliver Lee Jackson recalled hearing Charlie Parker and Max Roach play at nightclubs in the 1950s. Jackson, who was born in 1935, grew up during the Bebop revolution, and the kinetic language of his canvases echoes the freedom and spontaneity of jazz performance. But what most impressed him about the musicians he ...”

“... envied visual artists, he believed in their power. ‘I didn’t see exhibitions of Francis Bacon, Max Ernst, Magritte and Dalí as displays of painting,’ he wrote in 2003. ‘I saw them as among the most radical statements of the human imagination ever made, on a par with radical discoveries in neuroscience or nuclear physics.’ In 1995, in the ...”