“... magician, trance dancer, multifaith occultist, understood the true state of things. By excising slack prose and weaving royalty, terror outrages and a death-row rapist into an ecstatic rush, Burroughs would determine the future by recalibrating the wrecked present from the yatter of the most formulaic journalism. The cut-up text writes itself. ‘Capital ...”

“... more Martianism in another Faber debut, Philip Gross’s The Ice Factory. Clogged webs are slack-strung tennis nets; convulvulus, frail horn gramophones for bees – the opening lines assert, pulling out all the stops, but also requiring too much of that comma (which stands in for a plural verb but is asked to be singular), and perhaps also of ...”

“... generally indicted as the brainier half of a monstrous power couple. But the novel cuts her some slack for putting up with Sollers, then still the editor of Tel Quel, who in the course of the 1970s went from Moscow-line communism to Maoism and then to pro-Americanism with a sprinkling of libertinage and Catholic mysticism. Binet casts Sollers as a childishly ...”

“... In 1926 he published his wave equation, for which he would share the 1933 Nobel Prize with Paul Dirac. What were the waves in question? They were waves of probability, as it would turn out. In 1927, Heisenberg formulated his Uncertainty Principle; and while the uncertainty – or indeterminacy – related to precise measurements at the quantum ...”

“... but I tend to think of people with penises as men’) caused a certain amount of offence. When​ Paul Griffiths wrote his novel let me tell you, published in 2008, he made the formalist decision to narrate Ophelia’s life story using only her idiolect in the play – a vocabulary of 483 words. Good luck trying to voice personal grievances or casual opinions ...”

“... especially outside Ireland, may wonder at the gap in sensibility between Heaney (born in 1939) and Paul Muldoon (born in 1951), but to read about Heaney’s first years, his ‘nineteen-fifties/Of iron stoves and kin groups still in place’, is to see that the two poets do come from different generations: ‘I was well and truly formed,’ Heaney says, ‘by ...”

“... was nothing to morality except emotion. He also made a trip to Paris, where he learned about Jean-Paul Sartre and the existentialist doctrine that our characters are the product of our unconstrained choices. He noticed that Ayer and Sartre, despite their different styles, were dancing to the same philosophical tune: both hoped to achieve moral liberation by ...”

“... commentary on the town and its hypocrisies. Grace is found by an aspiring young writer called Tom (Paul Bettany), who is engaged in an inquiry into Moral Rearmament. Tom believes that the people of Dogville have no sense of community; and Grace’s arrival provides a perfect test of this notion. Politely, soft-spokenly reluctant to impose on Dogville, she is ...”

“... occasionally to be seen: reproductions on board of work by modern British painters – Ravilious, Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Pasmore. These, I think, were put out by Shell and turn up occasionally nowadays at auction, though not quite at Sotheby’s. That I’ve always liked – and found no effort in liking – British paintings of the Forties and Fifties I ...”

“... and disabled by Vendler, Lowell staggers into the anthology as the author of unrhymed sonnets. Slack work from the Notebook years is no substitute for ‘The Quaker Graveyard’ and ‘Mr Edwards and the Spider’. To omit early Lowell constitutes censorship, not choice. Several kinds of density lie outside Vendler’s range, including that tortuous ...”

“... earlier on the first Index Librorum Prohibitorum, issued in the Counter-Reformation pontificate of Paul IV, on the suspect grounds that they had fuelled the corruption of French politics. In the preface to the Six Books of the Commonwealth of 1576, Jean Bodin talks of ‘the delightful principles of Machiavelli, who lays down impiety and injustice as dual ...”

“... but, after all, sudden conversions occur. ‘Personally, I would have had the watchers out on St Paul for a long time if I had been in charge of the Christian secret service when he came blundering into Damascus yelling that he’d gone blind, and Christ was the Messiah.’ Railton does his work only too well and on the last page we see one of his younger ...”

“... the big boys move in. Shoreditch Town Hall has the feel of those charity shops that take up the slack when serious commerce pulls out of pedestrianised, Kentish shopping precincts, killed off by the Bluewater retail landfill operation. Creeping stealthily in, behind all the art blather, are the developers. Now heritaged poverty is a selling point, the more ...”

“... have put myself into a position where I may be forced to lie. In 1964, Cheever invited the writer Paul Moor, who was a fan of his work, up to his hotel room in Berlin. ‘I think he was or may be a homosexual,’ he wrote to a friend about Moor. ‘This would account for the funny shoes and the tight pants and I thought his voice a note or two too ...”

“... and tries to know the depth of Christ’s agony. His effort is broken up by stray thoughts and the slack morale of the boys around him, but he almost arrives at a point of identification. When the watch is over, the boys go out to swim in a pond, not long since cleared of winter ice and almost unbearable to the touch. Richard dives in and goes to the ...”