“... this 0.069 per cent of a day is making to the meaning of her life? C.M. Lucca, the writer created by Catherine Lacey to narrate her fourth novel, Biography of X, at least has the guts to admit the problem. Lucca is also the author of a book called Biography of X, as well as being the widow of the polymathic artist called X (1945-96) who is its subject, a ...”

“... as a second language and became the leading ESL writer of his generation, with a style marked by neologisms (‘smileful’, ‘unsmiled’), off-trail Latinisms (‘fenestral’, ‘penumbral’) and the literal use of words such as ‘febrile’, ‘redolent’ and ‘exude’. His aesthetic – stirring yet amiable, not entirely un-Rushdie-like ...”

“... Lake Wannsee was stunning from the dining room of the villa where the fellows stay, and would only be more beautiful in the spring. ‘As a Jew,’ another fellow replied, ‘I simply can’t look at the view without remembering that this house was occupied by a Nazi who was tried at Nuremburg, or that we’re only a short ...”

“... is a new dawn over the hill, that, before our very eyes, ‘things are improving’ – only to be contradicted by some even more authoritative voice, although it hardly needs the CBI to remind us of the frailty of political positive thinking. Yet the present administration has at least made Britain’s economic sickness ...”

“... shaggy black hair, gaunt and even hungry-looking, tightly wrapped in a coarse overcoat. It might be some Siberian exile, a Panslav mystic, a fanatic ready to hurl a bomb at the head of some ruler. Or a poor wretch spurned by the poets’ clique and hounded by the critics. And yet, with ...”

“... despite its exotic paraphernalia, the Craft’s wider influence on British society is perceived to be mundane and narrow in compass. The list of allegations on the dust-jacket of Short’s book runs to corruption in local government, perversions of justice, ‘the promotion of mediocrity’ and ‘marital break-ups’: why, the cover asks, ‘do so many ...”

“... about the anxiety of influence – ‘that looming, lowering pressure exerted, wilfully or not, by those who have already “made it” on those who have not, a pressure cramping, crushing and on occasion castrating the creative energies of the rising generation’. There’s a smack of Hamlet (cabined, cribbed, confined) here – so that when the literary ...”

“... fast and the former is very worried. Barnes and Noble has established itself as a market leader by traditional, and legitimately predatory, commercial practices over many decades. Its major expansion came with the ‘chaining’ of US bookshops in the Eighties. The UK usually lags behind America in retail bookselling so this process is only now underway in ...”

“... Natchez can offer the spectacle of an ancient house, set in its own gardens and park, surrounded by its agricultural estates, crammed with furniture, books and paintings from the past and, best of all, still occupied by a descendant of the family which built it. It is this irresistible combination of architectural ...”

“... years in Italy, in Australia, in New Mexico and Mexico, and so on. There are also numerous memoirs by people such as Jessie Chambers, Helen Corke, Catherine Carswell, Dorothy Brett, Mabel Dodge, a pair of gay Danes, and of course Frieda Lawrence, who knew the novelist at various times in various parts of the world. (There are naturally books also about ...”

“... the capacity for deliberate purposeful action. They hark back instead to a distinction revived by the 19th-century Austrian philosopher, Franz Brentano: ideas, beliefs, and the other contents of the mind, are about things. Because boulders, trees and the furniture of the physical world lack this property of intentionality – they are not about anything ...”

“... belongs to our God” ’. These events usher in the new heaven and earth foreseen by St John where righteousness reigns and death is no more. The present inheritors of this apocalyptic strain in Christendom, evangelical missionaries attached to Protestant Churches in the United States, are engaged, therefore, in an urgent mission to reach the ...”

“... for what the blurb calls ‘cultivated general readers’. It is hard to see how the task could be performed better. At its best, the Guide does not merely introduce lines of interpretation unfamiliar to the non-specialist, it also breaks new ground; and, as would be expected from the editors’ own works, it seeks to ...”

“... in hand when the one she wanted was still in the bush. Everyone had expected their marriage to be a disaster. It was and it wasn’t. ‘Saturday,’ Ms Skelton tells us, ‘was the gayest day of the week.’ In the morning they shopped, then they had lunch, then they quarrelled. After that, they did some more shopping, went to the cinema, had supper and ...”

“... the necessary collaborator in the act of telling, the one who listens, shapes the narrative by assuming that there is something there to be told, who takes the story, not as appropriation, but as part of a deal, so that the outcome – an entity, a story – might be placed ...”