“... home has left: what would Walser say to walking back with him in the night, it’s two hours on foot? Walser promptly agrees: The writer then stayed as our guest for a couple of days. Should I say something of his appearance? Well, he doesn’t look the way a reader of his books would imagine him, or a painter paint him. All his books have something ...”

“... were the only reality – not that one could believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw ...”

“... Country. He said that he’d bought the farm mainly because he wanted to build it up for his son, Michael, who worked alongside him. But a month ago he’d driven into Ixopo to get some provisions when the farm radio in his bakkie sounded an alarm ‘for Mr Arthur or Michael Mitchell’. Either Mitchell Sr or Mitchell Jr ...”

“... and heightens the fabular effect.* Two boys, best friends, one orphaned, set off on foot across the Caucasus with a bag and a Quran and a comb. Their names are Faroukh and Khalib. ‘It was the time of Saint Francis …’ It turns out that what Howe is describing is an Uzbek film called Man Follows Birds. Its director, Ali Khamraev, also made a ...”

“... at the bombed US barracks: ‘Every step, a stab of rage and horror, Here a finger, there a foot, or a hand, a forearm, an ear that improvised sextons picked up and threw in plastic bags like the garbage of a butcher shop: most of the bodies had been in fact dismembered into dozens of pieces.’ Angelo finds a Marine cradling a helmet in his arms ...”

“... biggest of its kind in the city, was as creepy as its owner. With a stone satyr over the fifteen-foot front door and forty rooms over seven floors, the decor was of the Gothic Quagmire school: according to the FBI agents who raided it at the beginning of July, it contains among other weirdnesses a photo-montage of Epstein standing in a prison surrounded by ...”

“... incompetence and perpetual failure. As calamity succeeded calamity, culminating in the outbreak of foot and mouth, any even moderately effective opposition would have been poised for electoral victory. Yet by then the Conservative Party had been painstakingly and skilfully positioned to repel any voters who had been disappointed or disillusioned by the poor ...”

“... examined, and examination invariably reveals a problem: the insufficiency of saying ‘he put one foot in front of the other,’ for example (when one foot is also put to the side of the other), or the paradox that walking down a ramp requires upward motion (the raising of one’s feet). If the laws of motion, gravity and ...”

“... painters; dissenters thought his work shallow, commercial and derivative. He was, the critic Michael Kimmelman argued in 1999, ‘the gold standard during the Gilded Age. But he invented nothing; he changed nothing.’ As the chronicler of a world in flux, perhaps he did not need to. If turn-of-the-century Britain was a society, as Strouse ...”

“... is too easy.24 October. In an interview for the Observer this morning Robert McCrum congratulates Michael Frayn on being more of a free spirit than others of his generation, ‘Michael Winner and Alan Bennett being prisoners of their own celebrity’.Prisoners possibly but I hope we’re not in the same cell.14 ...”

“... in a Sunday newspaper in two days’ time. How can I not be manic? The next day I met the poet Michael Horowitz in the local health-food shop. The last time I bumped into him, in the same place a few months before, I was about to deliver my completed manuscript. Today, I asked him to my launch party. ‘Maybe I could review your book,’ he said. ‘That ...”

“... in the Sligo area, where he lives. With writers such as Eugene McCabe, Tom McIntyre and Michael Harding he shares a commitment to local territories of the imagination and their distinct idioms, giving us access to a set of rich dialects and views of the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, setting up a healthy opposition to the Dublin/London ...”

“... he settled in London again, yet apart from describing how he nearly drowned in the Thames, at the foot of Westminster Bridge while larking in the watermen’s wherries, he says little about the city. Equiano’s story is extraordinary, yet it hardly tells us how its author ‘imagined’ London. Another former slave, Ignatius Sancho, wrote ‘the most ...”

“... he ever completely forgets about us.’ Always, always, ever, in this eloquent translation by Michael Hofmann. She knows how it is with fathers: Sometimes my father loves us, and sometimes he doesn’t. When he doesn’t, we can’t do anything about it, my mother and me . . . Any steps we might take only have the effect of delaying even more the time ...”

“... was accompanied by a widespread fascination with ‘Gypsies’ in popular culture. Klaus-Michael Bogdal, a professor of German literature at the University of Bielefeld at the time of the riots, was struck by the contradiction. In the early 1990s, Germans were taking up flamenco lessons. The French-Gitano band Gipsy Kings was hitting the top of the ...”