“... to call them roller blades and to think of myself as a blade runner, someone who is waiting for a Philip K. Dick novel to happen in. Specifically, I now glide about in the faster and more graceful Rollerblade Coolblades. These have a moulded and vented polyurethane boot with ratchet fastenings and high-rebound, polyurethane, Kryptonic wheels with sealed ...”

“... The Trial in 1925, and followed it with The Castle (1926), America (1927) and a volume of short fragments and aphorisms, The Great Wall of China (1931). The first work of Kafka’s to be translated into English was The Castle, which the Muirs brought out in 1930. In the twenty years following his death, Kafka came to be known in Europe and America ...”

“... of course.McCarthy doesn’t consider Tallis’s posthumous reception, but she mentions that his Short Service remained in everyday use well into the era of Handel and Arne, helping to establish the 19th-century view of Tallis as the ‘father of English church music’. He is one of a truly tiny band of composers anywhere in Europe from the medieval and ...”

“... and again, that they don’t like a single person in the room. And the style? Always first person. Short, decisive sentences like doors slamming shut. Her time working in a bar served her well: Riley is constantly attuned to the moment when the glass is about to fly. In publishing speak, her books are ‘slim and devastating’, which is the sort of epithet ...”

“... the unlikely story begins as the interstellar spaceship arrives somewhere. The paragraphs are short, to suit the expected attention span of the reader. The important words are in italics. Have we lived and fought in vain? Priest concluded that the judges should be sacked, the ceremony cancelled and the prize suspended for a year. The essay was a polemic ...”

“... the Byronic hero, Julian, more romantically alive on the page. Julian is distantly modelled on Sir Philip Sidney but is based more immediately on Vita’s ideal version of herself. Violet suggested a detailed description of Julian’s appearance. ‘“Julian was tall,” let us say and “flawlessly proportioned”,’ she wrote to Vita on 5 June ...”

“... of, this one is casual, even perfunctory. Long before I reached the end of what is a very long short book, I was at a loss to know why it had been written. Discussing the reasons why Burke, who had supported the revolution in America, should have been so hostile to the revolution in France, even in its earliest and most innocent phase, Hitchens remarks ...”

“... minds to new kinds of non-traditional poetry, and it was confirmed with the appearance of Philip Henderson’s modern-spelling edition in 1931. This put him within reach of the general reader, and the general reader, eager for a change from the post-Romantic pieties of the Golden Treasury and newly trained to rejoice in the toughnesses of Donne and ...”

“... the same Greek letter might be represented by more than one glyph; that instead of syllabograms, short or unstressed vowels were often simply omitted; that L was often written for R (according to his phonetic alphabet Caesar was indiscriminately KEESRS or KEESLS), T for D, K for G and vice versa. It followed, then, that the phonetic hieroglyphic alphabet was ...”

“... been led to believe, they are well-acquainted. The same room features as a location in James’s short story ‘Mora Montravers’.It’s perhaps not surprising that, in casting about for a title for The Ambassadors (1903), James seems to have taken inspiration from Holbein’s painting, which had been much in the news during the years his novel was in ...”

“... One day a long while ago Philip Larkin dropped a remark in passing about the difficulties of his current private life. He made it in the form of a jokey generalisation about the impossibility of relations between men and women, and added that the women ought really to marry each other, but that would be wrong, wouldn’t it? I forgot the remark for over thirty years until I bumped into it as an observation by one of the characters in Kingsley Amis’s latest novel, Difficulties with girls ...”

“... by special studies of anonymous or bestselling authors now suitable for academic recovery, Philip Fisher’s Still the New World marks a return in some ways to an older and less suspicious idea of ‘classic American literature’. Fisher is a critic who has written extensively on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on ...”

“... quality of each individual voice, including its timbre and its distinct registers’. He devoted a short chapter to a rapturous description of the quality of emotion in the singing of the castrato Velluti. In Feldman’s version of things, the castrato had no interest in being figuratively or really female, but rather was ‘decidedly male’. In a rather ...”

“... by an enigmatic figure, whom Panofsky identified as King Herod but Koerner, citing Lotte Brand Philip, sees as ‘the Jewish Messiah arrived as Antichrist’ already at the Nativity, noting that ‘Christians expected Antichrist to be temporally ubiquitous, circulating through world history.’ That a fiend often lurks behind a friend is a lesson Bosch ...”

“... lengthy biographies in English. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s is the longest, having overtaken Philip Short’s Mao (1999) and Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1995). It represents an extraordinary research effort. The authors have been working on the project since at least 1986, to judge by the date of the earliest interview ...”