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“... her father’s. On the second occasion Ronald Reagan gave the memorial address. Her father was Edgar Bergen, whose ventriloquist dummy, Charlie Macarthy, was the star of American radio before the war. The early chapters, which deal with the triangular relationship between father, daughter and wooden doll, are the best. Bergen skilfully describes the ...”

“... written by the woman in the middle to the man towards the left – the ‘soft musing poet’, as Edgar Wind imagined him, sweating in a pink silk number, ‘with some of the obesity of a coloratura tenor’. The little winged Eros stands at the clavichord nearby, ready to play continuo to his young master’s next outpourings. The poet looks to the sky ...”

“... by the gifted black writers Brent Staples (Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White) and John Edgar Wideman (Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society). One wonders what Gates’s fate might have been if he had been born in a black urban ghetto, and not in Piedmont, West Virginia. Among other things, Colored People is a testament to ...”

“... can also stand for what is sometimes gained in translation. For instance, the French open up Edgar Allan Poe and out pops Baudelaire. Here, what has been lost in translation – Poe’s energetic vapidity – represents an enormous gain. Equally, the new-style doll will cover plagiarism, the original sin. For example, Baudelaire’s essay, ‘...”

“... Edgar Snow, the famous American foreign correspondent, once asked Mao Tse-tung for his appraisal of the social implications of the French Revolution. Mao reflected a while and then, shaking his head, said: ‘I think it’s still a bit too early to tell.’ The late Chinese leader’s caution might seem excessive even to the most obsessive historians ...”

“... the greater glory of François Mitterrand. But with one ‘gap’, as it were, through which the wind from the left could come gusting in, that same left which in his young days our hero had so vigorously rejected. This boy from the South-West, educated in private schools and later a student in Paris, became enamoured – and why blame him? – of a social ...”

“... helped liberate the death camps and captured the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Next to J. Edgar Hoover, [Harry] Cohn has the finest surveillance system in the USA. The director Edward Dmytrk probably got it right when he refused to give names and honourably served his prison time and then – surprise! – became employable again by testifying ...”

“... a metre-high machine featuring a cute little quill clasped by a miniature silver hand. When you wind it up, it spends four laborious minutes writing out a Latin formula petitioning God for leisure and material prosperity, which seems a pertinent request under the circumstances. Getty’s star exhibit was a six-foot-high ‘android clarinettist’ dating ...”

“... I jerk the cord again and again, and nothing happens, I get worried. Niall rests on the oars as I wind the cord again, and says: ‘Have you the choke on?’ At the next pull it shakes into life and we’re off towards Dawros Head, untangling the fishing line, scanning the water for mackerel shoals breaking the surface. We throw the line out and almost ...”

“... tapes, confessions to unremembered crimes, a dispersed set. The weather is borrowed from Edgar Wallace’s quota quickies and the dialogue from Edgar Lustgarten’s forensic reconstructions. A posthumous dream with a cast of greasy-tie filth and poetry-quoting psychopaths; autopsy flashbacks. Moorcock’s memory ...”

“... vexes me to choose another guide: Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding, Where the wild wind blows on the mountainside. The difference between that and ‘Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers ...’ is absolute: the difference between poetry that comes out of the air, and the sort that an earnest nature-worshipper, inspired by the real ...”

“... façades were still pockmarked by shrapnel, weeds grew in the empty plots of bombsites and the wind whipped round the new skyscrapers on Potsdamer Platz, built to fill the no-man’s-land between former East and former West. In Hannah’s Dress, Pascale Hugues writes about one of these ordinary-extraordinary streets: the one she lives on. Born in ...”

“... and paranoia is set from the start, as if the book carried an endorsement from someone like J. Edgar Hoover. You do not expect to find many orderly complex sentences or emotional subtleties. And yet I Married a Communist turns out to be another of Roth’s intricately arranged performances. As in American Pastoral, his familiar alter ego, Nathan ...”

“... the suite, less for the clean sheets than for the opportunity to sit at his desk, listen to the wind in the bamboos outside, study the ink spots on the worn leather, and think about the Chairman. I first came to China in 1971 when the air stewardesses still sang Mao-songs in the aisle, and people waved goodbye at railway stations with Little Red Books. Ten ...”

“... pre-war writings of Sartre (whose Huis Clos Bowles translated in 1946), and the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, just about the only American writer Bowles appears to value at all. Unfortunately, Bowles’s concept of the writer as untraceable spy operates throughout his correspondence as well as his fiction. ‘If you get a letter from Paul, it’s about ...”