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“... to look at Hungarian Book Week. The Budapest Daily News, which I pick up on the plane, carries a short preview of the event: a record 112 new titles are to be published for this year’s festival, with a total printing of three and a quarter million copies. The books are on average less expensive than last year. Among the titles expected to be in particular ...”

“... Auden​ loved aphorisms, extracts, notes, lists. It was not just the shortness of short forms that he approved of: he liked their refusal of system even more, their acknowledgment that fragmentariness can only ever be papered over, never wholly subsumed. The nearest he came to publishing an autobiography, which was not very near at all, was A Certain World (1970), a commonplace book made up of his favourite quotations, arranged alphabetically under rough and ready, almost arbitrary headings, with only occasional passages of explanation or commentary ...”

“... trying to jumble the messages in each session by means of a long, randomised key, one could send a short key allowing a message scrambled by a machine to be unscrambled. The process could be made to work by equipping both sender and receiver with identical machines and codebooks of keys, each good for one day, say. The sender would transmit a ...”

“... became as famous as any American writer of his generation, and for the last twenty years of his short life bragged about the ‘big book’ – his Recherche du Temps Perdu – which would reserve a seat at the grown-up table of literature. Scattered chapters were published in which few saw greatness, but that book seems to have been hopelessly unfinished ...”

“... Written in elaborate, distended sentences, Purple America is Moody’s most ambitious book. Like Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, it concerns a homicidal stutterer in the suburbs. Roth’s subject was a teenage girl who becomes a politically enraged terrorist. Moody’s quarry belongs to another breed: the hero of Purple America is named Hex ...”

“... but hubristic might be a more fitting epithet. It is not so much one big novel as a collection of short-winded novellas, each with a beginning and an end, but not much of a middle. All the postmodern trickery in the world can’t disguise the fact that Cloud Atlas is, like a matrioshka, hollow at its core. So the narrowing of focus in Mitchell’s new novel ...”

“... by Continental experts in the latest techniques in warfare. The army and its cannon made short work of a number of English border castles and towers. In Northumberland, James awaited the English army, led by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. Though apparently possessing advantages in ground, equipment and supplies, James allowed himself to be ...”

“... an influential period figure and cautionary example whose mystique emanated primarily from the short story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, a smattering of critical essays and poems, a quiver of mordant wisecracks, and the sad promise of what might have been. Bellow was bigger game. With Bellow, Atlas was climbing up to the high diving ...”

“... have seen it coming? The advance, I mean to say, of a mediocre but ruthless man without qualities? Philip Ziegler’s book charts the boy Wilson’s ghastly youth, replete with team spirit, sycophancy, Scout’s honour and a craving to please elders and authority. There it all is, if you can stomach the reading of it. (It used to be expressed in another ...”

“... at that moment of surrender.’ His idol was Billie Holiday, who gives the name to one of his best short poems. The speaker is looking for his girl, who has been taken away by a figure ‘as a god’. It ends:If you find anyoneanswering their descriptionplease let me know. I need themto carry the weight of my lifeThe old gods are gone. What lives onin my ...”

“... Ekkehard Jost observed, he would deliberately leave his melodic lines open, ‘stopping just short of the goal for which he is heading, and placing a dash’. His sound changed over the years: brash, buoyant and somewhat waxy on his first recordings, when he was a young man determined to make himself heard, it grew into something more languorous and ...”

“... may not have now come to an end, wrecked or perhaps just beached on the shores of the Postmodern. Philip Fisher’s new book, however, makes a daring case for the continued relevance of pre-Christian ideas about the passions. His argument is that we underestimate the positive potential of the ‘vehement passions’, long understood only as forces that must ...”

“... not need to be told that the great scholar had told his interlocutor to kiss his arse. Latin, in short, played vital roles in the first modern age. From Prague to Peru, it served as the arena of literary artistry, the vehicle of scientific communication and the medium of common-room gossip. Individuals across Europe and beyond knew Latin as intimately, loved ...”

“... book. So if you’re an academic wanting to write a book about Psycho, you really need an angle. Philip Skerry has come up with 60 angles: the 49 shots that make up the ‘shower scene’ proper, from Marion’s feet stepping into the bathtub to the moment when Norman is heard shouting ‘Mother! Oh God! Mother! Blood! Blood!’ back at the house, which ...”

“... deeply immersed in the image of man as trivia,’ Alfred Chester wrote when panning Updike’s short story collection Pigeon Feathers. ‘Reading Updike, like reading the New Yorker, gives one the impression that the pages would turn to ash at the mere suggestion that life was other than a negative-positive mosquito buzzing in the ear of a total ...”