“... neither simply the writer himself nor a delegated fictional character but a kind of semi-fictional short-cut to an idea in the making. The essay, we might say, is the place where thoughts can have a hero – as distinct from novels, where heroes and others just have thoughts. When Musil says that Thomas Mann and others ‘write for people who are ...”

“... so much over anything not entirely uncritical written of Winston in World War Two (or WWW2 for short), there was no possibility whatever that Charmley’s 648 pages for 30 quid would pass by quietly, attracting deadly praise of ‘the best one-volume Churchill biography published this fortnight’ variety. Inevitably, the suggestion that post-1945 world ...”

“... with the German Jews but lived in ‘Little Odessa’. Marcus starred on the debate team and wrote short stories for the school magazine. He got good grades, was accepted at Yale, and seemed on the path to assimilation. But Yale was going through one of its periodic anti-Semitic paroxysms. ‘If we do not educate them, they will overrun us,’ warned the dean ...”

“... good movies out of the later list (for example, LA Confidential, The Usual Suspects, Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould), and a few others (Nil by Mouth, The English Patient, The Truman Show, Shallow Grave) that someone might feel it was worth crossing the road for; but in general his argument that Lane’s evident talent has had little to work on and ...”

“... off in an instant. A warrant for my execution was drafted at the moment of this conception.’ Short stories rely on parsimony and Perlman’s overwrought sentences don’t often work. The prose is better when he writes with more detachment. ‘In the Time of the Dinosaur’ offers a frosty, child’s-eye view of a superannuated father. Lucas wants to be a ...”

“... than a dozen speeches called the Philippics, after Demosthenes’ almost equally nasty attacks on Philip of Macedon, three centuries earlier. The chase had degenerated into an elaborate, occasionally comic game of hide-and-seek, with Cicero torn between holing up in his villa to wait for the inevitable knock on the door and making a speedy getaway by ...”

“... Off and on, for over half a century, William Gaddis worked on a manuscript about the short life of the player piano in the United States. Over fifty years on an outmoded entertainment? There is more here than meets the eye: ‘Agapē Agape is a satirical celebration of the conquest of technology and of the place of art and the artist in a technological democracy,’ Gaddis wrote in a proposal from the early 1960s ...”

“... of the sons and daughters, rather than that of the migrants themselves. From Henry Roth to Philip Roth, it’s the second or third generation whose experience shapes the fiction of immigration. Brooklyn is unusual in telling the story from the immigrant’s perspective, the more so since Tóibín’s protagonist is female, young, unattached and ...”

“... conceptual and not really catchy title, relaunched the Kundera backlist: The Joke (1967), the short story collection Laughable Loves (1969), The Farewell Party (1972), Life Is Elsewhere (1973), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979). If you weren’t reading the new book, you were catching up on one of the others, or feverishly waiting for the next ...”

“... rule was the only option. With a huge army and navy to finance, the Government was desperately short of money. It also found its right to raise conventional taxes challenged in the courts. The reign of the Major-Generals was not intended to increase military expenditure, rather to reduce it. They were instructed to build up local militia forces – rapidly ...”

“... and explain. This is the least mimetic of biographies. It is a long book about a writer of short fictions. It is full of stodgy sentences about someone whose phrases were like darts. King, close to his subject, is determined not to be bamboozled by her. Particularly by her claim that she didn’t see the point of making things up: that she drew on her ...”

“... continuum. Updike’s Self-Consciousness is well up at the art-over-life end of the spectrum; Philip Roth’s record-straightening and strangely flat The Facts is, perhaps surprisingly, of the other type (and his intensely focused Patrimony is somewhere in the middle). Kingsley Amis’s riotous Memoirs are lifelike, too much so for some. Terence Kilmartin ...”

“... the Danish master Jørn Utzon; the inside by a confused committee, or, as the Australian critic Philip Drew sourly calls them, ‘a conspiracy of nobodies’. It is a bittersweet story, and one that goes far to explain why most modern architecture is so awful. Like Sydney, the Opera House was a British idea. Sir Eugene Goossens, the violinist and ...”

“... finesse and a military-trained marksman. He had been at Reed College in Portland with Snyder and Philip Whalen, a formidable Pacific Rim triumvirate of youthful poets and seekers. Heavily dosed on Gertrude Stein, and fired up by a chance encounter with William Carlos Williams, Welch was confirmed in his destiny as an outsider, a casual labourer, cab ...”

“... like Adler and Jung – and he, not the patient, was gestating Moses and Monotheism. In short, it’s hard to know where to look when H.D. regrets the death of Freud’s disciple, Van der Leeuw, and the master replies: ‘You have come to take his place.’ Someone had to; the succession needed securing; naturally, ‘the Professor insisted I myself ...”