“... Rostov, the finest product of the European education favoured by the Russian aristocracy for more than a century, visits the far from luxurious home of a distant relative. He is a nobleman living in the country with his serf ‘wife’, Anisya; he has, it seems, abandoned that superior attitude to the Russian ‘people’, the narod, that generally ...”

“... Notebook; then split the undertaking in two, History and For Lizzie and Harriet; and added one more, new book of them, The Dolphin? What would happen to the resulting endless ‘litter of variants’ – and ‘litter’, pray, in what sense?! At what point would the career – the ‘one life, one writing’ – balance? (Perhaps the most striking way of ...”

“... of ‘gland’ to ‘gleam’. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. In The Gift, there is a more generalised debt to Bloom’s shopping. Godunov-Cherdynstev’s purchase of shoes – an epic of hypnotic banality retailed with rapt pedantry – is inconceivable without Joyce’s example: ‘A young woman in a black dress, with a shiny forehead and ...”

“... go, de Man’s was certainly unusual, and an account of his publications might seem to make it more so, for his first book, Blindness and Insight, appeared only in 1971, when he was 51, and even then, it is said, he published only because Yale drew the line at bookless professors. There were to be only two ...”

“... for a subjugation during which about 10 per cent of the island’s population died and many more fled to Japan; after it was over, Northwest Youth members joined the island police. This was well before the Korean War, during which terrorist youth groups killed tens of thousands of civilians in North and South Korea. What was learned from declassified ...”

“... saw to it that their adored teacher did not suffer the consequences of a practical un-wisdom even more hopeless than Kafka’s. One cannot say that Kafka’s marvelling at mundane accomplishments was not genuine, was a ploy. The snag is that when the person doing the marvelling goes on to do great things this can leave those with the commonplace ...”

“... weren’t political, or that I wasn’t a political writer. I now know that there is nothing more political than the depoliticisation of the lives of women and children. This depoliticisation, effected on a wide scale, has now empowered a supposedly democratic state to force children to be born whom nobody, least of all the state itself, is equipped to ...”

“... and resumed. ‘Homosexual and jailbird, was he nevertheless as bad as he was painted? Or, more to the point,’ and she took up her soup spoon, ‘was he as good?’ Unbriefed on the subject of the glabrous playwright and novelist, the president looked wildly about for his minister of culture. But she was being addressed by the Archbishop of ...”

“... Some​ of the more pessimistic commentators at the time of the credit crunch, myself included, said that the aftermath of the crash would dominate our economic and political lives for at least ten years. What I wasn’t expecting – what I don’t think anyone was expecting – was that ten years would go by quite so fast ...”

“... it explores the impulse to self-impose a siege and accept a tightly monitored environment. All the more impressive, then, that it pushes back against the morbid and precautionary aspects of lockdown.It did no harm to the film’s reception that the insecurities induced by Covid were compounded in Northern Ireland by Brexit. While Belfast was in ...”

“... of an admittedly strange and somewhat ill-starred career, Maude Hutchins seems to have provoked more than her share of misogynistic sex-baiting and condescension. Yet in some uneasy degree one may also sympathise with Hutchins’s first critics. There is something peculiar about the novelist’s erotic preoccupations, her almost queasy-making interest in ...”

“... old. During the lesson, we choristers had been exchanging notes, probably sniggering at one of the more pompous priests – the one who, as he processed towards his stall, held his clasped hands pointing outwards from his breast, like a pious fish – and then we were up on our feet, and were singing ‘O Nata Lux’ by ...”

“... arrest of Arab children in Israel and Jerusalem. Parts of the Israeli press have been considerably more forthcoming and straightforward in their reporting and commentary on what has been taking place than the US and European media. Writing in Ha’aretz on 12 November, Gideon Levy noted with alarm that most of the handful of Arab members of the Knesset have ...”

“... on all the islands in the mid-Atlantic on the way. I had two volumes of the collected works of Thomas Balogh in my luggage, required reading for progressive Latin American economists, as well as a small Stilton cheese in a china jar. This had been purchased at Fortnum and Mason, on the recommendation of my Chilean friend Claudio Véliz, the Latin American ...”