“... of a single Peruvian life with the chronic mismanagement and distempers of Peru. As narrative, it may be complicatedly told, with much canny transiting between present and past, but the formal ingenuities work to the one end, of delivering a full and unhappy report on the way things have been or are in the novelist’s homeland. Outwardly, the story is a ...”

“... of the workforce. ‘Heads of households’ formerly employed in the asset-stripped factories may be on the dole while their wives may be the only people in the family with a job – they are now the bread-winners. Nearly a million jobs may yet disappear by the turn of the ...”

“... that is not self-protective and self-regarding. The sentences I have already quoted from the book may begin to give an idea of how fierce this attack and this regret can be. There is a clue to this development in a magnificent piece in Pulse called ‘Marriage Lines’ – though I confess the clue was easier to see because I read the novel before I read the ...”

“... Roman state had no interest in education as a means of moral or societal improvement. The Romans may have been, as Bloomer’s subtitle suggests, the originators of ‘liberal education’, but nothing here points to liberalism in the modern sense. Liberalis meant ‘free’ not as in ‘freethinking’, but as in ‘non-slave’. For the liberales of ...”

“... has supported such a long and large-scale emigration process.’ The story of these labourers may shed light on China, but to claim that it forms part of a century-long state project of emigration as overseas expansion is wrong-headed. The Chinese state’s domestic and international projects changed many times in the course of the 20th century, as did ...”

“... first things we should understand about grief is its banality, its need of ordinary old words that may seem flat but will not seem evasive. ‘The griefstruck are not depressed, just properly, appropriately, mathematically … sad.’ Even so, a writer has to do more than glumly name this sadness, and if not evasion, then a certain obliquity is essential to ...”

“... Anywhere between two and twenty minutes before delivery of a statement the interpreter may – but also may not – receive the speaker’s text in the original language, sometimes accompanied by an English translation, known as a ‘Van Doren’, after Charles Van Doren, a teacher of English at Columbia who was ...”

“... weeping is never an appealing sight, but I don’t know whether anyone noticed. If they did they may have guessed the truth, which is that even for the fortunate grief comes, and there is not much anyone else can do about it. Living in the world I had entered on 18 October, I understood how pampered and oblivious I had been before; perhaps the most shocking ...”

“... their six children – all passengers on the Lusitania, which was sunk off the coast of Ireland in May 1915. Perhaps that loss made her feel she had no one to leave her jewels to, even though she had a younger son (my grandfather), another daughter-in-law (my grandmother) and a baby granddaughter (my mother). When the Lusitania was torpedoed, the British ...”

“... failed arithmetic past spring to my eyes at the merest glimpse of an equation. A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but so is a lot of knowledge that only a few magisterial types are permitted by their own obfuscations to understand. Compare and contrast a novel that misapplies quantum theory with the building and dropping of a nuclear bomb. And what ...”

“... in 1997. In March, several thousand birds died in rural chicken farms. Fowl plague was back. In May, a three-year-old boy died. It took a long time to identify the virus that killed him because it hadn’t been found in humans before. In August it was found to be the same as the chicken virus, subtype H5N1. In November there were more human cases, and by ...”

“... far from the unquestioning pastoral many reviewers took it to be, although part of its popularity may derive from this misreading. The novel is deeply pessimistic about the capacity of pastoral to tell truthful stories about the landscape. A period of forgetting – when the old shape of the village fades under the pressure of enclosures and mechanisation ...”

“... and his children, who seem to be inexplicably upset by Hannah, or by her not knowing them. You may begin to worry that they are her family, unrecognised and, as strangers, faintly repellent. As it turns out, you’d be wrong, which is a relief of sorts, and a lesson in not jumping to conclusions. She does have a family, however: a mother, father and ...”

“... your hand along the spines of the books, concentrating on the question you want an answer to. You may feel a tug, a certain book demanding attention; you may feel that this is mere frivolity, that any selection will be random. Either way, your fingers will linger on a book. The important thing at this stage is to know, with ...”

“... is a book for the specialists of the Dorothy L. Sayers Historical and Literary Society. Others may note that Trevor Hall isn’t quite reliable off his own subject: a poem by T. S. Eliot that he says ‘was not reprinted elsewhere so far as I am aware’ was indeed reprinted, and not only in the Collected Poems. If John Buchan, in spite of his ...”