“... scholar Ilan Stavans says he made it more American. Maybe, and not because he was trying to be John Berryman avant la lettre.) The chronology by Stephen Hart in Clayton Eshleman’s 700-page The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (2009) is a compilation of Vallejo’s most atrocious dramas. A murderous riot, tragic love ...”

“... a thousandfold. It is clear from Wright’s work that the struggle in Egypt, not the wider world, took precedence for the doctor; that Zawahiri may have believed the narrow, Nile-confined geography of populated Egypt made it hard for insurgents to operate; but that he put the goal of Islamic revolution there to one side, in favour of closer co-operation with ...”

“... Fulke Greville, whose life of Sidney is the more substantial of the two treatises edited by John Gouws as The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke – the other being A Letter to an Honourable Lady, where the lifelong bachelor Greville offered a mistreated wife (now unidentifiable, and perhaps imaginary) the questionable benefit of his advice and ...”

“... from his immediate superior in the police force. ‘No man is an island, Dave,’ he says, quoting John Donne slightly out of context. ‘You can’t set yourself against the world and get away with it.’ The plot of the film says this cynical fellow is wrong, but taking up a broader perspective, we could ask where the movies, and many great novels, would be ...”

“... of the stranger allies of the missing child’s mother is a self-appointed representative called John Calvin, the moving spirit behind the local Neighbourhood Watch. Borrowing for this character the name of a punitive theologian, who doled out self-satisfaction to the elect and despair to those destined to be damned, isn’t likely to be a novelist’s mark ...”

“... globally – a big if – we will before long be able to trade carbon anywhere in the world. As John Lanchester noted in the last issue of the LRB, the science of global warming is not straightforward. The basic physics has been clear since the 19th century. What’s been harder to understand in detail are matters such as the many feedback loops by which a ...”

“... start of the operation to ask what they thought its legacy would be. Not one – not Labour’s John Reid, now Baron Reid of Cardowan, or Des Browne, now Baron Browne of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to ...”

“... to what other writers were doing about the war. In 1943, after reading a story about the army by John Cheever in the New Yorker, he wrote to Mackie: ‘The trouble with writing a story about the army is this: people expect something to happen in a story (Cheever supplied things, lots of things); but the whole point of the army is that nothing ever does ...”

“... its duel scene, its mad adorable heroine and above all its sad soliloquising black-clad hero all took on iconic status, as symbols of theatre or even of the arts themselves, incessantly quoted from, happily alluded to (there is a character in Dickens mentioned as looking like Hamlet’s aunt, and this must have made sense to most of his readers). We may ...”

“... smart book around that time was Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, which took the 19th century to task for writing history with one eye on the future, and in particular for taking as the only path through the past the development of democratic institutions. On the Whig interpretation, historical characters got a tick if they were on ...”

“... sister Renée in 1929. The work that their father put in at the department store, Lubow writes, ‘took place mostly out of the children’s view’. But ‘the attention that Gertrude devoted to herself they witnessed daily. Mrs Nemerov typically stayed in bed in the morning past 11 o’clock, smoking cigarettes, talking on the telephone, and applying cold ...”

“... she told her husband, angry that he wouldn’t take care of her the way that Leonard Woolf took care of his wife. ‘That’s one thing I shall grudge Virginia all her days – that she & Leonard were together.’ Mansfield thought that if only she’d had Woolf’s life (‘her roof over her – her own possessions round her – and her man somewhere ...”

“... artist who never earned much money. Her mother, Marijama, ran a boarding house for other painters, took in washing, and made sure that the girls acquired the means to earn their own living: hairdressing, shorthand typing and, in Helen’s case, massage. They were very close, but the family had few resources to draw on in trying to cope with what happened in ...”

“... and security, that we can recognise how weird those years really were. The importance of John Lewis Gaddis’s book is that it is the first coherent and sustained attempt to write the Cold War’s history since it ended. That alone makes it hard to resist, but it is also wise and imaginative and written in a vigorous, simple English which is a ...”

“... protective suavity, the counterfeit of impeccable logic or a minute calibration of fashion. John Berryman once said to a friend: ‘Doesn ‘t reading Stendhal make you feel intelligent!’ The same is true of Hazlitt; and the justified praise of Paulin’s book is that the compliment to our amour-propre survives his exploration to a generous ...”