“... to which no one is ever invited. There is a mysterious sister.’ That isn’t quite the set-up in Paul Theroux’s very disconcerting new novel, Mother Land. There are two success stories among the seven surviving Justus siblings (one died in infancy), neither colossal, and operating in adjacent areas of cultural activity: the poet and literature professor ...”

“... scene: a strangely empty stretch of the Seine, at the crossing-point between Suresnes and the Bois de Boulogne, where Parisians imagined themselves in the country. The view is from one side of the river, cropped so that the prow of a boat and the prongs of a tree intrude from the left; reflections seep and blur across its surface, like colours mixed into the ...”

“... his admirable study – his ‘other Pushkin’ is the storyteller and novelist, not the poet – Paul Debreczeny quotes Pushkin’s comments on Shakespeare’s characterisation. They go hand in hand with inconclusiveness, and show why it is that though Shakespeare had to finish the play, his characters never do. They are not completed by their dramatic ...”

“... Cordova to Kampala and Rio. One of them, ‘the infamous Ramírez Hoffman’, was born in Santiago de Chile in 1950, three years before Bolaño, and like Bolaño later lived in Lloret del Mar in Spain. He died in 1998, while Bolaño died in 2003; and he was the vicious madman that Bolaño perhaps thought he himself could have been. The curious ...”

“... a certain magnetism, it was true, but he looked nothing like the ‘handsome animal’ in the Man Ray photographs Gilot had seen in Cahiers d’art: ‘dark hair, bright flashing eyes, very squarely built’. Picasso came over to Gilot’s table, where she was dining with her friend Geneviève Aliquot and the actor Alain Cuny, bringing a bowl of ...”

“... fills a hundred pages of one goatskin volume, a blacklist of nearly three thousand names. ‘A man’s first duty is to his tailor,’ Oscar Wilde (another patron) quipped, but obviously not when it came to paying. Winston Churchill was a regular customer, even having his suits cleaned and pressed at Poole’s, until an overzealous clerk sent a letter to ...”

“... Kappa Epsilon fraternity with a hot coathanger. Michel Foucault was at the Societé française de philosophie, considering the question, ‘What is an author?’ The two, needless to say, never met. Foucault may have visited Texas on one of his lecture tours, but Junior, as far as it is known, never took his S&M revelry beyond the Ivy League – novelists ...”

“... not the sloppy legend or the gigantic ghost of himself who haunted movies like Don Juan de Marco and The Score. Brando’s autobiography is called Songs My Mother Taught Me, and the chief song he learned, whether she taught it him or not, was to hate his father. The book has extraordinary passages expressing the wish to do violence to the old boy ...”

“... use of the journal form for a kind of poetic and philosophical reverie, in works like La Rage de I’Expression (1952) and La Fabrique du Pré (1971), which lies behind Derrida’s recent choice of the same device. It is worth pointing out at this stage that both Genet’s two-column text and Ponge’s ‘Le Pré’ were first published in the magazine ...”

“... of the absence of determination? Sartre’s uniqueness consisted in the fact that, by a coup de force which presupposed a good deal of force and a good deal of violence (the unassuming old man at protest meetings and on marches has made us forget the young normalien’s ‘masterly self-assurance’, which the critics ...”

“... ours rested not so much on military prowess as on economic primacy.’ The last chapters of Paul Kennedy’s epic study suggest that American power is subsiding relative to other powers rather than dying. Vidal sees himself as the literary chronicler of the rise and decline of American power. His latest novel begins as the Spanish-American War of 1898 ...”

“... the dark towers of Saint-Sulpice. George-Jacques Danton lived here, and Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, Legendre the master-butcher, Fabre d’Eglantine the political playwright, and a dozen others who would make their names through the fall of the old order. In the year the Revolution began, this area was known as the Cordeliers district, taking its ...”

“... she found the kindest context for the dwarfishness of her hero, who she described as ‘a small man, not much smaller than Napoleon. He limped because of a club foot, as did Byron. Very clever, he got a scholarship to Heidelberg where he acquired his doctorate.’ Lady Mosley burbled on in this vein for a bit, spicing things up with references to ...”

“... published in Life magazine in 1969, Prince Karim Aga Khan was an ‘outrageously wealthy young man, written off by many as a mere playboy’, who had proved his critics wrong with a display of business acumen – a vast real-estate venture in Sardinia. Sailing across the Mediterranean on one of his yachts, the Aga Khan had fallen in love with its ...”

“... was presenting a radio programme and I thought she was talking about me when she spoke of a young man who had just lost his mother. Francis Pym said, ‘Guns fire from Number 10’ on the Sarah Kennedy show. I took this to mean the PM had given the order to sink the Belgrano. But Mr Pym was speaking in a different context. ...”