“... Desperate Characters is ‘obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow’. My own reservations lie not with the superlatives, but with the implicit grounds for comparison. If Fox is, in Franzen’s phrase, ‘inarguably great’ – and I believe she is – it isn’t because, for example, she does a ...”

“... failed in some way, have proved ‘minor’, not ‘major’. The first three, for instance, are Philip Henry Gosse (the Father of Father and Son), who had his work for ever upstaged by The Origin of Species; John Churton Collins, a good journalist and scholar for ever cruelly ‘placed’ by one harsh Tennysonian snub; and Eliza Lynn Lynton, an early ...”

“... at times owe as little to religion as political blackness does to the idea of Africa’. Philip Lewis, a resident of Bradford with firsthand knowledge of its complex and often divided Muslim communities, did not anticipate the latest round of troubles to afflict the city. Rather he offers a cautiously optimistic view of accommodation and change. He ...”

“... Aesop was painted most likely in the late 1630s, as part of the decor of the Torre de la Parada, Philip IV’s hunting lodge outside Madrid. It would be good to know something of its original place in the building, or at least be sure that the Torre was its first destination, but as usual with Velázquez the court records are mute. (Even Las Meninas is a ...”

“... that poetry was always on the horizon for him. Carver preferred, indeed, to be called ‘poet and short-story writer – and occasional essayist’. Gallagher reprints his occasional essay ‘Some Prose on Poetry’, which tells how he came across a copy of the magazine Poetry in a house he visited while working as a delivery boy. The magazine’s owner let ...”

“... publication was a poem. So I suppose on my tombstone I’d be very pleased if they put ‘poet gad short-story writer – and occasional essayist’. In that order. KB: But in some ways your poems and stories are very similar. Your stories are in many ways like poems, and your poems usually tell stories. RC: True. Narrative poetry, poetry that has ...”

“... with speed and fluency. Formally, it’s unruly: at just under 300 pages, it’s one of those short books that reads as though it wants to be much longer, with oddly matched long and short bits, bald patches, messy ends. In particular, Mary’s arguments, excuses, circumventions concerning the unfortunate ...”

“... researched, gruesome detail and ‘period’ dialogue; love affairs across ethnic boundaries). Philip Hensher amusingly panned that book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), which was set on a Dutch trading post in Nagasaki Bay in 1799, as ‘an exotically situated romance of astounding vulgarity’. Hensher took issue with its ...”

“... alleged are correct. Fame, after all, has more chance of attaching itself to the long than the short-lived. A more interesting suggestion put forward here is that the Black Death had less impact on the old than on the young. Certainly its effect in causing a step-down of the population of Europe to a level where it remained for the next century and a half ...”

“... between his backside and the chair on which he was seated. Visual, suggestive, memorable – in short, a film sequence which plays. While he was gently edging the slowly-developing script of The Emerald Forest towards the starting-line (Goldcrest backed the project first, spent $2m and then dropped out, whereupon Embassy Pictures stepped in), Boorman was ...”

“... been happy, and whose literary ambitions have been trivialised. First, she insists, ‘Austen’s short life may have been lived in relative privacy, but her novels show her to be a citizen, and certainly a spectator, of a far wider world.’ Second, and more controversially, she argues that ‘the true subject of serious fiction is not “current ...”

“... Circle, resuming the story in the late 1990s.’ The Closed Circle is either going to be a very short book, or Patrick is going to have to pep up a bit. Coe’s fastenings and fixings are not often so ugly and obvious – so butt-hinged – but his plots are often of such a complexity as to require a preface, explanatory acknowledgment or appendix. The ...”

“... also goes broader and deeper. The Western tradition of historiography was created in a remarkably short time by two men. Herodotus invented the idea that a major work of history should be a work of art, the idea that history-writing should be analytical, not merely narrating but also searching for the causes of things, and the idea of weighing evidence and ...”

“... Big beautiful eyes, good bones, a serious nose, a large, modern mouth and a figure to die for. Short though. A pocket Venus, they called her, barely five feet tall. But, according to Tim Heald, her latest biographer, who has previously committed to paper the lives of Brian Johnston,2 Denis Compton,3 Barbara Cartland4 and Prince ...”

“... in the taxi from the airport the air was drier than in the capital, and it was warm enough for short sleeves. When I told my driver that I had travelled from England to see the mummies of the vanished Chinchorro people, he boasted that they were better known internationally than they were in Chile. This isn’t entirely accurate. Most of the Chileans I ...”