“... of rice has been stolen and the possible culprits are made to stand in a line. ‘We shall see who took the rice.’ There is a silence and then the Mullah speaks and points to the villain. ‘It was you.’ But Master, how did you know? Only you touched your beard for fear that some rice might have stuck to it. Not a really convincing story. All the ...”

“... pursuing. The book enraged so many middling and middle-aged reviewers – some of whom actually took Thirlwell to task for the crime of being young – that one badly wanted to warm to its refreshingly callow, hectoring and capacious take on the history of fiction. Sadly, Miss Herbert was not what it seemed, and over the long (600-page) haul Thirlwell’s ...”

“... fell away in the 20th. In 1991, the Sumo wrestler Takanofuji was weighed at 21 st 6 lbs. In 1924 John Rodney Bastard weighed 2 st 9 lbs; ten years later he was 8 st 10 lbs. Trust in Berry Bros counted for a lot: that a hundredweight of coffee really was a hundredweight has always been everything; that Byron really did weigh 11 st 5 lbs; that the contents of ...”

“... if the apparatus of censorship did not exist.’ This is an anthology for export only.André Brink took primary responsibility for selecting the work translated from Afrikaans; J.M. Coetzee for that in English. They do not represent their own work. Both are novelists of international reputation, and the bias of the collection is towards writers little known in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”