“... prefaced by a painting of a fish. Gould’s biography emerges in fits and starts. His father, a ‘French Jewish weaver’, died during his conception, and his Irish mother died during his birth. Brought up in an English poorhouse and educated by a paedophile priest, he claims to have had numerous adventures around the world – including an unlikely stint in ...”

“... of that final ‘clanking’? For all its richness, isn’t there poverty there as well, an almost French melancholy (Laforgue!) to the paragraph? ‘Spring in Beijing was as brief as a young girl’s grief over a bad haircut,’ it says, more smartly and sassily, less mysteriously, in another story. Of course it was also, as Les Murray puts it, ‘the years ...”

“... Macmillan scrambled through the emergency exit, then went back into the burning plane to rescue a French flag lieutenant – a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of ...”

“... and made her watch while his wife performed oral sex on him – showing her how to do it ‘the French way’. (She told them she would never do ‘the mouth thing’, much to Carvelli’s annoyance.) They enrolled her in a brothel, where she was entered on Buenos Aires’s register of newly arrived prostitutes. By the time the couple decided to take her to ...”

“... pontificate of Paul IV, on the suspect grounds that they had fuelled the corruption of French politics. In the preface to the Six Books of the Commonwealth of 1576, Jean Bodin talks of ‘the delightful principles of Machiavelli, who lays down impiety and injustice as dual foundations of the republic, and renounces religion as undoing the ...”

“... submitted to the authority of the pope’. The gravitation of the unreformed Scottish Church to French Catholicism was equally unwelcome to Henry, and led, as he saw it, to a break in church history. During the reign of Edward I, ‘the bishops of Saint Andrews and Glasgow were not as they now be archbishops, but recognised the province of our archbishop of ...”

“... Labour: the Labour Party under Mr Blair more closely resembles the party of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden than one kitted out for the Nineties. Inevitably, given its strategy, the most obvious characteristic it shares with Very Old Labour is timidity and a wish to be thought acceptable by the existing élites. One form of this is New Labour’s ready ...”

“... a model for royal biography successfully followed by Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, James Pope-Hennessy on Queen Mary and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett on George VI. Now the wheel has come full circle, and we are back to George V again. Is there any need for this? If plain history does not ...”

“... All of this conversation is then enlivened by the regular appearance of Wittgenstein on wheels. Philip Thody and Howard Evans, in their bonhomous Faux Amis and Key Words, are happy to have Wittgenstein say, just like that, that the meaning of a word is its use. But Wittgenstein did not think the matter that simple. Burchfield prefers the more ample and ...”

“... Hull, across the river from his home town. There, supported by colleagues like Richard Hoggart and Philip Larkin, he founded Critical Quarterly, a journal which continues to appeal to a mixed audience of schoolteachers and professional academics. After a year at Berkeley, during which his classes were disrupted by the Free Speech Movement, Cox returned to a ...”

“... courses and mature literary criticism focused upon their work blossom around the world,’ Philip and Carol Zaleski report, but they hedge their bets when passing literary judgment on The Lord of the Rings. ‘His admirers cannot resist comparing him to Dante, Malory, or Blake, with the necessary proviso that Tolkien is incomparable.’ Are they among ...”

“... looks as though Schulz could barely identify himself with reality, let alone with the Jews,’ Philip Roth once observed to Isaac Bashevis Singer. He was using the terms of a famous joke of disavowal in Kafka’s diaries: ‘What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself.’ It’s true that Schulz was born into a Jewish ...”

“... greedy and above all conformist to the highest degree.Much of Annihilation is concerned with French electoral politics, though Houellebecq has tried to avoid excessive topicality (and the rapid obsolescence bound in with it) by setting the book in the near future, in 2026-27. This attempt at future-proofing may have been reasonably effective when the ...”

“... its capital. The town has no characteristics except efficiency and conceit and feeble imitation of French artistic vice, where the vice is doubled and the art dropped.’ Having got half-way through Faust Part One, he reckoned it ‘more a wonderful collection of very good remarks than a dramatic masterpiece’ (to his parents, 27 March 1914). After seeing a ...”

“... happening at once, nobody has time to take much notice – this was all said in the 36 lines of Philip Larkin’s ‘Vers de Société’. While nobody would deny that Coover and his contemporaries opened our horizons twenty years ago, I would see Gerald’s Party as the work of a writer imprisoned in his own success. If this were to be the last of the ...”