“... of the postbellum Soviet treatment of Germans in the eastern territories, voiced again recently in James Bacque’s Crimes and Mercies. How high the seas of humbug swell. Like Madagascar, the ‘Frankfurt’ School – at least in its first incarnation – was a toponymic anomaly. Marcuse barely had time to check out of the luggage reclaim in Frankfurt after ...”

“... tore away at Ireland from within – Sean O’Faolain, Liam O’Flaherty, Patrick Kavanagh and Frank O’Connor – he alone mauled its vulgarity and provincialism in the formal modernity and impersonality of his work. Seamus Deane has described how an Irish literature of dissent registers alienation but is not a literature of alienation. In the formal ...”

“... lack. You Are Having a Good Time shows signs of its age. There’s a blurb from the now disgraced James Franco, which is actually very Amie Barrodale. I can imagine a story of hers in which a writer forces a famous actor, living in obscurity after a litany of accusations, to rescind his praise for her work. There are shades of #MeToo in ‘Animals’, about a ...”

“... narrative. Yet if you require a novel to be one entire and perfect chrysolite in the Henry James manner, Durrell is a non-starter. His fiction is made up of wildly different elements which there is no attempt to harmonise. He has ebullient moods and phases, and he wants to get them all in. There are the great descriptive set-pieces, often motivated by ...”

“... architectural history. In the years of Thomson’s apprenticeships in the 1840s, another Scot, James Fergusson, was busily chronicling the history of world architecture. By the end of the decade, it was possible for architects in the most remote provinces to form a clear picture of Hindu cave temples or ancient Egyptian palaces, and to contrast them with ...”

“... it, nothing goes on in posh hotels, nobody meets under clocks at stations, there’s nothing like James Bond, nothing glamorous about it at all. Maybe if you get into top level it is glamorous because you’ve got a lot more money, but it’s not glamorous, so maybe dealing with a woman is a bit more glamorous, I don’t know. I think we get her ...”

“... is patterned on the one in Moscow, which owes much, in turn, to the London Underground. Frank Pick, one of the guiding geniuses of the glory days of the Tube between the wars, was given a medal by Stalin in 1932 (although he did not, as Wolmar romantically suggests, meet the dictator in person). When work began on the Moscow metro in 1931, it was ...”

“... so intensely expressive at times and so terrifyingly deadened at others. When the film came out, Frank Kermode wrote in the LRB (6 January 2005) that ‘to give Pacino his due, he plays [Shylock] as a human being, increasingly vicious as his wrongs accumulate, totally lacking the sentiment of mercy, but always true to his culture and its eloquent ...”

“... James Schuyler​ gave his first public reading on 15 November 1988. People queued around the block to get a seat, and at the end he received the longest, most unconsciously glad applause Eileen Myles had ever heard in New York. ‘As for my moment in the spotlight,’ Schuyler reported to a friend a couple of days later, ‘well, truth to tell, I was a fucking sensation ...”

“... in the Western academy can claim the credit for this: Clifford Geertz, Benedict Anderson and James C. Scott. Geertz, one of whose many talents was for the writing of superbly perfidious book reviews, was the master of the catchy phrase: he gave us ‘theatre state’, ‘agricultural involution’ and quite a few others, which then travelled from their ...”

“... is not a pale-faced sincere attempt to hold the mirror up and has nothing in the world to do with James Joyce. It is supposed to be a lot of belching, thumb-nosing and belly-laughing and I honestly believe that it is funny in parts.’ He wanted to be a popular writer, but Irish society in the 1940s and 1950s simply did not provide enough people, or enough of ...”

“... of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer with great assurance. And, more recently, Robert Rhodes James discovered the roots of Anthony Eden’s vulnerability better than any contemporary profile-writer. This is not the privilege of hindsight. Newspaper editors simply do not have high enough standards. They should commission profiles from our best ...”

“... a marketing tag, not a manifesto – caused a stir when it was published in the US in June. James Wood reviewed it at length in the New Yorker. Heti, he said, ‘may well have identified a central dialectic of 21st-century postmodern being’, but he also complained that her ‘prose is what one might charitably call basic’. The radical feminist ...”

“... rapport between actors that animates such classics of the genre as It Happened One Night (Frank Capra was Cassavetes’s favourite director) or The Awful Truth or Bringing Up Baby. Part of the fun of those movies comes from the sense they give that the actors themselves are having fun. An actor having fun with a part, playfully embroidering it, opens ...”

“... ejaculation, it had to be negotiated between the two spouses, and must have involved a frank discussion of body parts. The use of the various barrier devices available, of which the condom was only one, also involved verbal negotiations between sex partners, so that on these occasions practical necessity must have overridden prudery. Mason argues ...”