“... as if he were trying to limbo-dance under an impossibly low bar’; a broken nose has its ‘small shift of cartilage’; an ‘old battered practice piano – soft from years of pounding – produced a dog-eared tone, slightly yellow’; ‘the sun sits in the sky with acetylene brilliance, chalky and pure’; the wife in the title story remembers how ...”

“... Earle, and Bogart began to feel better about himself. His character in the film had two friends, a small dog and Ida Lupino (she had top billing on the picture; it wasn’t quite a Bogie vehicle). Quickly, Huston wanted him as Sam Spade in what would be his first directing job, The Maltese Falcon (1941). At last Bogart was a hero, yet just as hard as Dashiell ...”

“... regime in the US is best described as ‘fascist’, it was hard not to think about Trump, Musk, Stephen Miller and their new friends Zuckerberg and Bezos. The basic governing coalition hasn’t changed all that much: thugs, zealots, careerists, entrepreneurs and grifters. As we left, we were told that there was a café. Run by an Israeli woman, it was ...”

“... the pharmacist thinks the best thing is to wait until he goes. Which he is doing when he spots a small woman in her sixties at the other end of the counter looking at cosmetics. ‘And that goes for you too,’ he says, shoving his face into hers and taking a handful of eyeliners. Suddenly the little lady erupts. ‘Right,’ she says, ‘I’m a ...”

“... people whom he could move around ‘like God’. Eudora Welty’s people live mostly in, or near, small free-floating towns like Morgana, with its water tank and courthouse and its ‘Confederate soldier on a shaft’ that resembles ‘a chewed-on candle, as if old gnashing teeth had made him’. They go their own ways and are not haunted by history. You can ...”

“... At the end of his two-volume biography, Stephen Walsh writes that Igor Stravinsky’s music is ‘the one unquestioned staple of the modern repertoire, the body of work that, more than any other, stands as an icon of 20th-century musical thought and imagery’. There couldn’t be a richer subject for a musical biographer and Walsh admits to having an obsession with his subject ...”

“... scientists are numbered many of the best-known figures (and popularisers) of our day, such as Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg and Roger Penrose, not to mention all the proponents of superstring theory. But Horgan has also found some more fitting targets for his scorn. The expansion of science, the increasingly brutish struggle for survival that ...”

“... might seem to be a way of not coming across (though one remembers George Eliot’s pungent vapour Stephen Guest). Perhaps Highsmith can’t quite bear to think that the matter to be contemplated is less that of a liveliness, a life, annulled than of a collusion between something of a personal nullity and modelling’s nubile nullities. More likely, though, is ...”

“... grating playfulness: ‘Rather it is a fever of futures, an ardour of perpetual anticipations.’ Stephen Millhauser, for all his novel’s faults, is dazzlingly gifted, not just in the richly sensual precision and wit of his writing (the ‘hot blue bulb’ of the silver camera flash Edwin’s father brings him, ‘so that he can press his fingernails into ...”

“... Ursula MacParland, paid the fine (or did I imagine that?) and secured her man. She had a small inheritance to spend after the death of her parents and worked as a teacher. She had been, in 1913, one of the earliest women to get a degree from UCD. Whatever there was by way of romance or distinction in my grandmother’s story was undone by the early ...”

“... to demonstrate the superiority of white European settlers. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Stephen Jay Gould showed not only that such theories were based on the disproved belief that cranial capacity predicts intelligence, but that the artificially shaped skulls of preserved ancient Peruvians had often been taken to prove they were a naturally ...”

“... indelible colouring of Scottish society’. Scotland has survived and still exists as a chain of small collective loyalties: ‘Society People’ singing in the hills or clansmen enlisting with their chieftain, colonists on the Vistula or private partnerships in Bengal, crofting townships in Assynt or mining villages in Fife. When Scotland’s last deep ...”

“... peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. Orthography became important: Geoffrey or Jeffrey, Ann or Anne, Stephen or Steven. Girls’ names were especially given to whim and proliferation. In the 1930s, my mother was christened Doreen because a Russian acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ever known. This nice Doreen seems ...”

“... they were there to defy the arm of the law . . . If I fired I must fire with good effect, a small amount of firing would be a criminal act of folly . . . I fired and continued to fire until the crowd dispersed . . . If more troops had been on hand the casualties would have been greater in proportion. It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the ...”

“... in 1939) only increased the call for Tin Pan Alley ante-bellum nostalgia, a staple product since Stephen Foster’s day. Waller would wage uncivil war on any cotton corn that came his way.Ante-bellum Waller is daring for its day, and still very funny because the objects of his parody are known to us still: Gone with the Wind, of course; the movie Jezebel ...”