“... from home? When national stereotypes are contradicted, nobody knows what to say. If he were French or from a Latin country the papers would be full of stuff about his being detached, laid-back, shruggy. As it is, they reach for the received-opinion file – which doesn’t have anything in it about the not at all rare phenomenon of the New Age German ...”

“... various bodily functions, and re-places Oe squarely in the existential tradition, to which, as a French scholar, he remains indebted (Japanese critics, however, also make much of his American-style narratives, including the ‘Americanisms’ of his Japanese). If he is not exactly a realist, he is not really a Modernist either (despite the fireworks of his ...”

“... the snick and swing of tense shift could get away with the opening of the 1993 story ‘Comet’: Philip married Adele on a day in June. It was cloudy and the wind was blowing. Later the sun came out. It had been a while since Adele had married and she wore white. It is the most radical economy to convey a life encompassing two marriages by repeating the ...”

“... is something a little too on the nose about biblical literalists building an ark. Yet as Philip Almond recounts in his new book, the same questions that preoccupy the evangelicals who visit the Ark Encounter have troubled Jews, Christians and Muslims for millennia. Almond argues that we underestimate the importance of Noah’s story. To ...”

“... a counterlife, with fiction and fact constantly ducking and weaving around each other. As in Philip Roth’s novel of that name, moments that look like intimate revelations are shown to be virtuoso displays of formalist trickery, and vice versa. For the first sixty or so pages it is possible to read Arabesques as an intelligently contemporary attempt at ...”

“... narrator’s story begins a few years later, in medias res, at Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525, when Philip of Hesse’s mercenaries crushed the peasants led by Müntzer in one of the last battles of the German Peasants’ War. Müntzer was captured, tortured – confessing his heretical belief that ‘omnia sunt communia,’ ‘everything belongs to ...”

“... been but few occasions when the whole company of Angry Young Men was assembled. Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and John Wain knew one another at Oxford, but had little to do with autodidacts like Colin Wilson, John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe – this last name less often mentioned in this context than might have been expected, doubtless because Saturday Night ...”

“... a tailor, a lacemaker, a potter and a jeweller all died better off than the royals they served. Philip Rundell, diamond jeweller by appointment, was a millionaire. The personal assets of Queen Charlotte, his most important customer, were valued at £140,000 – diamonds, presumably, included. Some magnates with the Midas touch ...”

“... Germany and isolating it further. Most European states remained Catholic: to their rulers, notably Philip II of Spain, the English were anti-Christian and their queen a heretic. She spent the last 18 years of her reign fighting the Spanish, emptying the royal war chest and becoming increasingly dependent on the rich merchants who topped it up again. Driven by ...”

“... the Blutrinne. Müntzer was captured and, after a fiery exchange of scriptural justifications with Philip of Hesse, tortured and executed.By June the peasants had all but lost in Franconia, Swabia and Alsace. Then the Swabian League scattered five thousand rebels near Würzburg, ending the war and commencing an orgy of mopping-up and retribution that ...”

“... with the other five shortlistees, appeared on the front page of the Times. My parents were French teachers, and though my father knew far more about French literature than his wife, it was she who picked up the phone and used phrases I thought I would never hear issue from her mouth. When she had finished, she ...”

“... experiments. But we had to wait for the end of the century. Robert Wilson, designer/director of Philip Glass’s Monsters of Grace, ‘a digital opera in three dimensions’ which has toured North America and Europe since it opened last year, says of this work: ‘I’m not giving you puzzles to solve, only pictures to hear.’ Some of the tales that Rée ...”

“... Myriam Anissimov’s biography of Primo Levi, first published in French two years ago, begins with a kind of stutter surrounding the writer’s end. The book’s Introduction, prologue and opening chapter all invoke his death, as if it were a threshold that had to be crossed but couldn’t be crossed without returning ...”

“... Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728), a work which Johnson drew on for the Dictionary, the French Encyclopédie, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776), and the more specialised works studied by Lawrence Lipking in his important book, The Ordering of the Arts in 18th-Century England – Charles Burney’s History of Music, for example, Joshua Reynolds’s ...”

“... to possess the early fruits of Elizabeth’s pedagogical formation: her translation from the French of Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, the religious poem composed by Marguerite d’Angoulême, the favourite sister of the King of France, which was her 1545 New Year’s gift for Catherine Parr (she was not yet 13!), and which Starkey calls ...”