“... how ‘my brother and I struggled against the iron fact that my mother wasn’t there any more.’ The mother’s death is not the only event that echoes through Maxwell’s work. In another story, ‘The Holy Terror’ (1986), he writes: ‘I remembered that my mother’s only brother lost an arm in an automobile accident.’ In So Long, See You ...”

“... who was devoted to obliterating the genteel posturing of 19th-century dance by introducing a more vigorous interpretative art, wrote of Nijinsky ‘softly leaping great distances ... overflowing with an abundance of power’. Alexandre Benois, the painter, and one of the new kind of set designers courted by Diaghilev, saw the young Nijinsky as ...”

“... well clear of social media, but he’s a veteran of the festival circuit, the TV studio and, more recently, the podcast couch. His website describes him as the director of ‘more than sixty’ films; in fact, it’s more than seventy. And we need to add the 23 operas he has staged ...”

“... Black Death in the mid-14th century led to another drop in temperatures, as reforestation allowed more carbon dioxide to be absorbed. Certainly, by 1400 Atlantic pack ice had dramatically increased in volume, and farmers could no longer depend on warm summers. And two centuries later the planet was a chillier place than it had been for hundreds, perhaps ...”

“... it’s likely that by the end of the 16th century only a handful of schoolchildren could read more than a few lines of Homer in the original. Those who fancied themselves as scholars could cite the odd tag from the Iliad and the Odyssey (Odysseus’s assertion ‘let there be one king’ was a favourite), but even literate people would have had only a ...”

“... which the human race shares in common’ and that, therefore, ‘no one originally has any more right to occupy a particular portion of the earth than anyone else.’ But the ideal of ‘communal possession’ was hobbled by geographical reality: the brute fact that the earth is round, which means that human beings ‘cannot spread themselves out over ...”

“... to the Crown. Preparing for the trial, the government had quickly passed a new law to make things more comfortable. For nine months at the start of the war, Joyce had ‘broadcast for the enemy’, and that was enough to finish him. A.J.P. Taylor later remarked that he was hanged for making a false statement on a passport – the usual penalty for which was a ...”

“... unanimity of spring made way for the bitter struggle between classes.The autumn offered a more complex picture. In September, October and November, counter-revolution unfolded in Berlin, Prague, the Kingdom of Naples and Vienna. Parliaments were shut down, troops returned en masse to the streets, insurgents were arrested and sentenced. But at the same ...”

“... ghost. The possibility that one of these sites might fall prey to property developers generated more squeaking and gibbering in the London streets than you could shake a severed head at. Greenrooms of actors ranged anoraked bodies against the pile-drivers. Guggenheims of scholars jumboed in from North America. There was weeping and wailing and the gnashing ...”

“... It’s been painted on the glass by hand. It’s from the first sentence of Mason & Dixon.Thomas Pynchon was born on Long Island, New York in 1937. He studied engineering, physics and, later, English literature, at Cornell University, then worked as a technical writer for Boeing until 1962. Not long after that, he ...”

“... work hard for authors who are already successful, well-known; in fact, the more famous an author is, the more publicists work for them, the more attention these writers get, the more famous they become, in a nice, cosy circular ...”

“... in Dante eloquent acts, and he always suggests that within the conversations he is describing more is going on than is quite being said. The moment that best illustrates this (and it would be my poetical desert island disc for its great social delicacy) is when Dante and Virgil meet the poet Statius in purgatory. Statius explains who he is and tells Dante ...”

“... the Yiddish journal Literarishe bleter. He was also reading Schopenhauer and Hamsun, translating Thomas Mann and The Possessed. ‘I couldn’t be the sort of Jew my pious parents wanted to make of me,’ Singer later declared. ‘I couldn’t, and didn’t want to be, a non-Jew. I could live neither with, nor without, God. I aspired to the big, free ...”

“... coming back, as in an account of one hundred successful attempts to quit smoking. The problems are more durable than the solutions. Herbert’s poems are varied and innovative in form, virtuosic in technique and full of surprises. They juxtapose biblical images with images from Herbert’s own world, making the former fresh and the latter spiritually ...”

“... themes. I want to praise the epistolary Burns, who is deeply interested in his own poetry, but has more of the byre about him than the lyre. There is more to the poems he made up for himself and for his first friends about the tasks and pleasures they pursued together, and to the poems he wrote about his art and about its ...”