“... over how to deal with matters so fundamental, and so unhandsome, restrained me, for two years and more, from writing of what happened. And its resolving gesture proves troublesomely literary, as a fruit-laden bough is translated (from one side of the situation) into cultural Urtalk: Turning to the woman, I asked what they were called in Greek. She ...”

“... vanity and the sad prospect of an imprisoned self acting as if it were free. This prospect is made more acute by the way Svevo writes his novel: it is told in the first person, by Zeno Cosini, a Trieste businessman now in his late fifties, who has been asked by his psychoanalyst to write an account of his early life. Zeno is a ...”

“... newspapers alongside cartoons, whose irony Garner’s bewildered mother failed to understand. More than twenty years later, a journalist tried to speak to her about all this and, as Garner recorded in her diary, she ‘sat there, silent, sick with horror, thinking, “They were right to be enraged. It’s a wonder I wasn’t lynched. I should have been ...”

“... Suppose​ a friend you trust more than any other, who taught you the meaning of friendship, lets you down suddenly, and then persistently ceases to fulfil the expectations you have come to have of them. Would you give up all your friends? Would you simply avoid that particular friend? Would you try to have it out, which probably wouldn’t work, but would, if you held your nerve, change your relationship to yourself as much as your understanding of the other, ‘a deepening in the notion one holds of friendship … learnt from possibly unintended mistakes’?Of the many allegories of the philosophical task, as she saw it, scattered through Gillian Rose’s writings, this one, from Judaism and Modernity (1993), is my favourite ...”

“... spasmes’, and after two weeks the producers pulled the plug. The broadcast found a more receptive listener in Samuel Beckett, who wasn’t only in favour of an art of last gasps but had recently been brooding on radio drama as a pure play of sound and silence. ‘Merveilleux, merveilleux,’ he wrote the same day in a note to Duras, whom he ...”

“... in seeing it as the key to much in Burke. O’Brien’s explanation employs historical concepts more real and convincing than Kramnick’s, which blends Marx and Freud in an ultimately clumsy synthesis; and it points correctly to Yeats’s third mistake. Burke did not ‘hate Whiggery’: he loved it and hated it. Dr O’Brien is at his least satisfying ...”

“... synthetic pheromone aren’t introduced.This is Jaynes’s explanation for a response that seems more like the breakdown of a machine than a reaction to threat. The Inca had no precedents for these ‘rough, milk-skinned men with hair drooling from their chins instead of from their scalps so that their heads looked upside down, clothed in metal, with ...”

“... but remorseless, urbane yet gritty. It is germane to the American culture wars but vastly more interesting. It is an adventure story in itself, and a stepping-stone to better ones. My only regret is that this book – you can think of it as the third of a trilogy – will be more widely read than Sahlins’s ...”

“... the publication of the series and people’s reactions to it, and so it takes place on a higher, more self-conscious level, so to speak. It also recapitulates some of the material in the earlier books, particularly the father’s death in Book 1. Actually, if you want to begin here with Six, maybe you ought to read Book 1 first.Q. Is this fiction or ...”

“... Before her death, Larsen made a last attempt to visit Anna, from whom she’d been estranged for more than thirty years, and returned in a deep depression. On learning that she had been left $35,000 in Larsen’s will, Anna exclaimed: ‘Why, I didn’t know I had a half-sister!’ Larsen was five when the Jim Crow laws passed. In the South, she wouldn’t ...”

“... way and flies, immediately and without waiting for applause, out of the story. There is much more to tell. Amis can’t leave the canal fauna alone, the nature stuff of Camden. There is a minatory ‘dead duck, head down with its feet sticking up like the arms of a pair of spectacles’. Another vivid aperçu (stopping the drift), like . . . like . . . a ...”

“... building’s cellar, believing that rats creep up from it at night. It starts scaring him even more when Annie, the upstairs neighbours’ slightly older daughter, lures him into a cupboard in which her mother keeps a rat trap. Annie offers to teach him how to ‘play bad’: ‘Yuh must say, Yuh wanna play bad? Say it!’ He trembled. ‘Yuh wanna play ...”

“... captured in 1945 by Millicent Todd Bingham in her introduction to Bolts of Melody, a selection of more than six hundred poems culled from the vast trove of papers then in her possession. The papers were given to Bingham’s mother, Mabel Loomis Todd, by Dickinson’s sister Lavinia. (This is the collection now housed in Amherst.) Dickinson, Bingham ...”

“... need and an elaborate prank. He seems to have felt uncomfortable being serious in public, the more so as the public warmed to him. His eccentricity became a disguise, an armour of winking and raillerie concealing a man nobody knew.His upbringing didn’t dispose him to fit in. He was born in May 1866 in Honfleur, to a French father and an English mother ...”

“... and asks to borrow four eggs, which he then clumsily drops on the floor. He asks for four more, and as she reluctantly complies he drops her mobile phone in the kitchen sink. He leaves but promptly returns with another young man, slim and slick and clearly the leader of the pair. Nothing like the lowlifes in The Desperate Hours or Cape Fear, these ...”