“... it a bad idea. First, it would encourage artists to paint the wrong kind of picture: ‘It will be the exhibition picture that will gain ground and the room picture that will suffer.’ Second, spending decisions which should be personal would be delegated: ‘I notice that the minimum ...”

“... important publisher. It was not mere hype to label him, as the blurb did (concocted, presumably, by Maschler), ‘the most important publisher in Britain’. Third, it was generally implied, he was a bit of a shit (‘the rudest publisher I’ve ever met’, as one less rude and much less successful publisher told me). You can’t ...”

“... England, especially In Search of England, first published in 1927 and already in its 29th edition by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to ...”

“... Europe, began his career in the service of the Marathas, and sired numerous part-Indian children by (it was said) 16 wives and mistresses. In a small yard outside the church, members of his multi-ethnic clan lie buried. Some of their tombs have crosses on top and epitaphs on the side in Persian – memorials to a period in Anglo-Indian history when European ...”

“... for special questioning when I presented my passport. After about an hour I was taken to a cubicle by a short but perfectly square woman in uniform who lolled behind a desk and looked at me long and mean. I had been on a seven-hour flight and no one had mentioned before I got to Heathrow that Air Canada was all non-smoking. I was not cheerful. ‘What’s your ...”

“... Friedrich Hölderlin was rescued from oblivion by a young German scholar called Norbert von Hellingrath, who wrote a dissertation on Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar and began the first historical-critical edition of his works. In 1915, a year before he died at Verdun, Hellingrath delivered a lecture describing Hölderlin as ‘the most German of Germans’, whose luminous hymns confide their message ‘only to the select few’ and remain ‘perhaps never penetrable to non-Germans ...”

“... When he published The Ice Storm in 1994, Rick Moody seemed to be looking for a workable compromise between suburban realism and what Gore Vidal once called the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on ...”

“... did happen during the Seventies was that a long-rooted process of relative decline reached, by a process of cumulative causation, a point somewhere near to crisis. Decline became a fashionable subject. This, in brief, is how I would characterise the chief events which happened to occur within the years from 1970 to 1979. Note how, for purposes of ...”

“... the second Trump administration. Elijah and Elias Moore, aka Smoke and Stack, twin brothers played by an alternately caddish and cantankerous Michael B. Jordan, return home to Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta in 1932. Smoke and Stack aren’t content to take on a sharecropper’s plot, but want to be entrepreneurial New ...”

“... is where ‘Hope Atherton’s Wanderings’ begins:Prest try to set after grandmotherrevived by and laid down left lylittle distant each other and froSaw digression hobbling driftwoodforage two rotted beans & etc.Redy to faint slaughter story soGone and signal through deep waterMr Atherton’s story Hope Atherton‘Gone and signal through deep ...”

“... at a pleasure in destruction, not to speak of a drive towards absolute victory which is bound to be self-defeating. However shattered the force of Hamas, however long it takes the Palestinians to re-enter the struggle, the actions of Israel will surely guarantee the permanence of this war. In this context, Trump’s claim in October to have personally ...”

“... President Reagan’s attention span is known to be brief, and he is said to prefer his memoranda to be limited to a single page. It is therefore unlikely that he will read closely the 640-page report which describes experience of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nevertheless, it would be useful if he – and Mr Brezhnev – were to look through the photographs, which, for the convenience of those who will get no further, have been wisely placed before the text ...”

“... accumulation of material wealth, as an end in itself: the replacement of Squire Allworthy by Mr Bounderby. In this interesting and original book, Michael Miller suggests that they may have ordered these things better in France. His subject is the history of the greatest of the 19th-century Paris department stores, the Bon Marché, from its creation ...”

“... and chroniclers like Notker the Stammerer, Benzo of Alba and Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, we might be tempted to think that the history of France and Germany a millennium ago can offer us nothing more than the dreary spectacle of one barbarian succeeding another on the banks of the Seine or the Rhine. Even the fame of the great figures of the period makes them ...”

“... For reasons that are not immediately obvious, the question of canons is at present much discussed by literary critics. Their canons are of course so called only by loose analogy with the Biblical canons, so it may be of more than strictly clerical interest that there is a major row going on among the professionals who deal with the real thing ...”