“... sin. This is emphatically what doesn’t interest Amis or Adair. The movie controversy, in short, highlights the fact that the real source of Nabokov’s staying power lies elsewhere, in the words on the page. Readers and re-writers read Lolita for its expertise in unrealities – its literariness, its exploration of the questionable and disintegrating ...”

“... Levi as recorder over that of storyteller is to distort his achievement. Levi wrote at least three short stories before the war (two, ‘Lead’ and ‘Mercury’, can be found in The Periodic Table; the third was published for the first time in Angier’s biography, The Double Bond, in 2002). Although he insisted that before the publication of what he called ...”

“... of propped up, terminally ill consumptive girls (they couldn’t lie down because it made them short of breath). The Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo has some fine examples. Unlike The Scream, they are not surrounded by crowds of tourists, even if one of the best of them, The Sick Child, is also by Munch. As an adolescent, he had witnessed the slow death from ...”

“... goings-on’ (a chapter from A Glass of Blessings was included in the Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories). Her gay men ironise femininity, break the rules of decorum and make light of deep feeling. Mervyn Cantrell, the caustic and gossipy librarian who lives at home with his mother, shamelessly lusts after Ianthe Broome’s Pembroke table in An ...”

“... to forced labour and internal exile: ‘an era of forbidden books’, as she puts it in a short afterword to Haywire, ‘books that were victims of the cultural revolution, mostly translated Russian classics: Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and sometimes an American like Walt Whitman’. Constantine again: ‘Her poetry has little connection to poetic ...”

“... and end up asking: ‘really, must I think about all of this/a second time in this short life? … must I grieve it all again?’ Her jump cuts and exclamations say how absurd, how impossible, an ordinary adult life can seem; such a life must be lived within incompatible timescales, at once attending to the present moment, and planning for the ...”

“... and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she took her MFA. She has published two books of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005) and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (2010), and two novels, The Vagrants (2009), which seems to me one of the first masterpieces of our stumbling century, and Kinder than Solitude (2014), and now a book of ...”

“... the late ‘my mother-in-law’ British comedian Les Dawson). Somehow, I am always drawn to these short, pyknic or mesomorphic creators, whether they are Brodsky, Benn, Beckmann or my father. As the Nazis came up things grew abruptly tight for Beckmann. He lost his job in Frankfurt (‘public funds for Jew lackeys like Beckmann’), was pilloried in the press ...”

“... writing, the thing that can be learnt on the campus, ‘the consequences’, as Philip Larkin put it, ‘of a cunning merger between poet, literary critic, and academic critic (three classes now notoriously indistinguishable)’. Gay Clifford was an academic, and by all accounts a brilliant and effective one, a lecturer in English at ...”

“... in English have either stopped half-way (like Francis Steegmuller) or been too brief (like Philip Spencer); the most recommendable version of Flaubert’s life in recent years has been disguised as the two-volume Steegmuller edition of the Letters. Now comes Herbert Lottman, the diligent biographer of Camus. Pre-eminently a dredger and sifter, an ...”

“... and make your Holocaust victim an unusual souvenir of a memorable Sunday afternoon? Or maybe, as Philip Gourevitch observed, just throw it away as you leave the show? After all, the museum Holocaust experience always comes to an end, and your victim can easily be dumped with the trash when you’re safely back in the sunshine – a neat replay of ...”

“... the adulation was encouraged in part by James himself. Fulke Greville, whose Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney paradoxically extolled the past queen, who had done so little for his hero, in order to highlight the shortcomings of the present king, was not the recipient of royal favour. But William Camden was; his famous Annales were written with royal ...”

“... In Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), the five-year-old Infanta Margaret Theresa, daughter of Philip IV of Spain, has a precociously manipulated figure, her little torso moulded into a triangle above the ballooning shape of her tiered skirt. Promoters of female dress reform (‘healthful underdressing’) in the 19th century stressed the disastrous ...”

“... and he had made it so.’ His elegance is much admired. In the Twenties he has ‘his hair short, slicked down and impeccably parted, tie nonchalantly neat, white handkerchief fashionably ruffled’. In 1940 he impresses the Ministry of Information with his perfect dark-blue suit. On a visit to New York in 1945 he loses a trunk containing six of his ...”

“... of violent death, whatever the numbers involved, we do tend to demand explanations. Garrigan is short of them. That this should be so, testifies to Foden’s seriousness of purpose. It does mean, however, that at crucial points his novel has a flatness that leaves the reader stranded. Nicholas is a young doctor sent to Uganda to work for the Ministry of ...”