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“... to seem too dramatically intractable, and thus too easy; a way of reversing into simplicity. Christopher Lucas, Stone’s hero, is a journalist who is writing a book about the ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’, the way that city turns certain people into majnoon, or religious lunatics – who think they are the Messiah, or Moses, or Elvis, and who take Jerusalem ...”

“... by an excerpt from the St Matthew Passion. Is Casino therefore a movie about movies? Michael Wood described it in these pages as an ‘essay’, offering ‘brooding considerations of the big questions’, the biggest being why things always go wrong (‘In the end we fucked it all up,’ is how Rothstein’s sidekick, Nicky Santori, puts it). But it is ...”

“... not an intraduisible in sight. As for the achievement of Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood in orchestrating the English edition, that qualifies as heroic. The French and English differ in certain important respects concerning both the choice of terms and the word order. The English has ‘philosophical lexicon’ where the French has ...”

“... good reason: more than twenty-five years may have passed, but I distinctly remember how Frances Wood and I were warned that anyone contemplating working on the Mongol period in Chinese history would be issued with a bottle of aspirin, in view of the immense difficulties involved in studying an empire which employed in its administration not only classical ...”

“... To Christopher Isherwood I One among friends who stood above your grave I cast a clod of earth from those heaped there Down on the great brass-handled coffin lid. It rattled on the oak like a door knocker. And at that sound I saw your face beneath Wedged in an oblong shadow under ground: Flesh creased, eyes shut, jaw jutting, And on the mouth a smile: triumph of one Who has escaped from lifelong colleagues roaring For him to join their throng ...”

“... call them ‘sir’. They gave extravagant dinners and patronised the arts: the young Henry Wood owed a good deal to the physician George Cathcart. If they were exceptionally well-connected like ‘Tommy’, Lord Horder, they bought their Rolls-Royces from former prime ministers. Where, historians are now asking, is the historical cunning which has ...”

“... Malley’s Urn, a jokey homage to the famous hoax. In My Life as a Fake, the literary hoaxer, Christopher Chubb, ‘came from the dreary lower-middle-class suburbs. I would say he loathed where he came from.’ The motive for his will-to-hoax is laid at the door of this frustrated provincialism – which is to say, at the door of frustrated ...”

“... thing.’ The problem, as this revised possibility suggests, lies not with the facts but with what Christopher Prendergast calls ‘fact-complacency’ and ‘fact-naturalisation’. ‘The “facts”,’ Prendergast writes, ‘can have an imprisoning rather than an anchoring effect, as the mask that “realism” wears when acting as the servant of ...”

“... will also translate the last volume, but no announcement has been made about the intervening ones. Christopher Prendergast’s six-volume edition for Penguin (2002) is still in print and much read. The translators there are Lydia Davis, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier and Ian Patterson.The afterlife of Scott Moncrieff’s ...”

“... thing about the writer in question. Often, though, this invented self is a problem. Michael Wood’s oustandingly brilliant new book is in part a corrective to the public persona adopted by his subject. Wood calls this persona ‘Nabokov the mandarin’, and robustly describes it as ‘a set ... of ...”

“... who has hitched a ride with two men, a wool trader called Kuzmichov, and a priest called Father Christopher. (Rayfield tells us that the young Chekhov made a similar trip, on a trader’s cart.) As they leave the boy’s home village, at the start of the journey, they pass the cemetery in which his father and his grandmother are buried. Chekhov’s ...”

“... polished and recombined them prolifically: a further eight books came out in the 1980s. Norwegian Wood, an uncharacteristically realistic love story, became a huge bestseller in 1987. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, published in three volumes in 1994-95, brought a warmer embrace from the Japanese literary establishment, which had previously filed him among ...”

“... one can be certain whether adults are speaking seriously, or think it funny if they are not. Christopher Logue who has compiled The Children’s Book of Comic Verse for Batsford, and Julia Watts in The Children’s Book of Funny Verse (Faber), have both grasped the essentials about a child’s sense of humour – far better than the 1935 editors of The ...”

“... are sitting on the bough you are carried along at full speed, rocking comfortably on the elastic wood. It is also possible to use the branch to ride up again. The chief advantage, aside from the simplicity of the whole device, lies in the fact that the branch, thin and flexible as it is, can be lowered or raised as necessary and gets through anywhere, even ...”

“... of the term ‘Elves’, as also for his shabby dealing with the splendid notion of Great Birnam wood advancing upon high Dunsinane hill. The Merton Professor of English Language and Literature admits with some complacency to ‘not being specially well read in modern English’ and to ‘no interest at all in the history or present situation of the English ...”