“... with dagger blows, would retreat from the horror of his life, and throw himself on a gun, to die straight away. Should we say, with the critic Antoine Compagnon, that this is an instance of killing quickly the person one can’t bear to think of killing slowly – that van Blarenberghe horribly literalised and accelerated a common process? This is well ...”

“... the Acropolis: all that stuff they told us about ancient Greece is really true. But Nietzsche goes straight for the counter-intuition. Not how great Apollo is but how great Dionysus must be, if Apollo has to work so hard at his music and ritual and architecture. Not how beautiful these people and this culture are, but ‘how much did these people have to ...”

“... you will not be astonished to learn, was ‘grey’ in the opinion of the Bundys.)Now, I know that Michael Ignatieff was aware of the existence of the above correspondence at least a year ago. And I also urged Bird to send it to him. But the Vietnam drama takes up less than a page of his biography, and mentions Berlin’s real positions not at all. We are ...”

“... for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite. Some of them slid straight into the dictionaries of quotations and stayed there, and are still daisy-fresh more than a century later. ‘From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day,’ he once said. ‘From his neck up, he is worth anything his brain can ...”

“... are worthy of Benjamin Franklin) one asks one’s self what one is doing in that galère.’ Michael Anesko’s strikingly authoritative ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship gives a good many detailed and salutary answers in its essential account of exactly what James was doing in his conduct of his career as a ...”

“... limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael Chabon. This came ten years too late for Yates, who died of emphysema and complications following minor surgery in 1992. His fiction is closely modelled on his own experiences and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a miserable place. The Easter Parade ...”

“... learns to masturbate. But there is another scene likely to have caused the board to sit up straight. Although McGahern wrote to Monteith to say that he had introduced ‘vagueness’ into the scene in Chapter 3 in which the father and son share a bed, it’s clear that some sort of sex takes place between them. The chapter opens: ‘The worst was to ...”

“... David Hare, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and teacher Henry Derozio, the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. If Kipling had been born fifty years earlier, it would have been impossible for him to write the cheerfully assonantal but bleak lines: ‘O East is East, and West is West/And never the twain shall meet!’ It would have been equally ...”

“... was the first in a loose ‘LA trilogy’ (with Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire), while The Straight Story (1999) was suspiciously without perversion, a sweet Midwestern road movie rated ‘G for General’. ‘Isn’t it odd that there are two directors named David Lynch?’ someone said at a preview screening.The best essay in David Lynch’s American ...”

“... we concede that May, however ghastly, is a more attractive option than flesh-creeping figures like Michael Gove or Liam Fox. Rather, Ziblatt prompts consideration of more fundamental options. Having the whole appalling crew in power from time to time has been the necessary cost of avoiding a fragile and fearful democracy that never knows when the next military ...”

“... visit to the clinic. The rest of the novel consists of dialogue between Alicia and her doctor, Michael Cohen, taking place over several sessions in the weeks leading up to her suicide. By comparison with The Passenger, with its cryptic lapses into memory, dream and flashback and all its dangling plot threads, Stella Maris is alarmingly ...”

“... such as his willingness to be rude to small people, and then to make matters worse with blunt, straight-from-the-shoulder apologies. Others were more serious, like his increasing inability to listen to advisers. The most serious of all, faithfully recorded by Tam, was a perpetual inclination to see every event, every personal move by colleagues and ...”

“... point to register is the absence of novelty and idiosyncrasy in Paisleyism. Having got this straight, we come up against the question why the traditions which Paisley articulates have survived their contact with the modern world essentially unscathed. Can we improve on Tom Paulin’s suggestion of a ‘time-warp’ between the 17th and 20th ...”

“... of Lord Hartwell, who inherited the business on the death of his father, Lord Camrose, in 1954. As Michael Berry he served a long apprenticeship on newspapers in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Manchester and London before joining the Army in 1939. His verdict on himself after this experience was that he was a better sub-editor than a writer, and he demonstrated the truth ...”

“... Florence Nightingale. Yet Strachey himself seems less our contemporary now than he did when Michael Holroyd’s biography appeared in the late 1960s. Greeting the publication of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica in 1903, the young Strachey imagined that ‘the truth’ was ‘really now upon the march’ and that ‘the Age of Reason’ had dawned at ...”