“... in 1954. The roads were bad, there wasn’t much food and it was almost impossible to get more than a transit visa. A few intrepid sorts went to Dubrovnik and stayed in designated hotels, but that was all. So my father, William Woods, decided we should go. He was struggling to finish his novel Manuela (later made into a film, with Trevor Howard in the ...”

“... nerd with bad skin who still lives with his (ill, possessive) mother. They’re all QPR fans; all more or less thirty. Every year, without fail, the four of them celebrate 14 August, the anniversary of a perfect (in their collective memory, anyway) day they spent together in 1984, ‘halfway through the last summer we were together at school’. But in 1998 ...”

“... only a writer of very High Modernist tendencies would take this remark as a compliment, but Thomas Mann certainly did, and it wasn’t even addressed to him. He found it in Harry Levin’s little book on Joyce, which he read in 1944. He was also much drawn to another sentence in the same work: ‘The best writing of our contemporaries is not an act of ...”

“... that ‘the terrorists … would not survive.’ The deaths of the talented gunmen shouldn’t be more regrettable than those of their more ordinary comrades, but they are because the story has paid more attention to them all along. The novel confuses two different injustices here: on the ...”

“... is between Hannah and Robert, an alcoholic dentist. Alcoholism and dentistry have coincided, more grotesquely, in Kennedy’s fiction before: a desperate character in Everything You Need (1999), a publisher called Jack Grace, visits a sadist in Soho to be administered alcohol enemas; by way of payment, the sadist gets to extract one of Jack’s teeth ...”

“... older trade tends to be skated over. Nicholas Faith’s The Winemasters of Bordeaux (1978) begins, more or less, with Pepys’s visit to the Royal Oak Tavern on Lombard Street in 1663, where he encountered ‘a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with’ – that would be Château Haut-Brion, still ...”

“... Belgian entrepreneur, but unquestionably a secondary character in the novel. Cayce, one of the more memorable heroes in 21st-century American fiction – who, as it happens, would never in a million years work for Dominic Cummings – is relegated to a minor role as an anonymous ‘weirdo’ hireling. Verity Jane, in Gibson’s new novel, Agency (Jane is ...”

“... like a snake disturbed from its tree’. It’s unlikely if not impossible that Randeep would be more familiar with snakes than electric cables, but the simile, back-to-front though it may be, works because it shows he considers himself in unknown and potentially dangerous territory. It’s there for our benefit, not Randeep’s. Because Sahota doesn’t ...”

“... Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1823, soon after the appearance of Thomas de Quincey’s celebrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Hogg delivers what might be called the Scottish verdict on this awesome substance, a substance full of Eastern promise, but also one which, having been invited to the banquet of the ...”

“... engages them? One of the immovable facts of life is that time is not expandable. If we allocate more of our attention to particular and specialised concerns, we will have less of it for what is common. I think Sunstein is being alarmist, however, about the effects of specialisation and individual control. He himself points out that before the ...”

“... the novel than the disconnect between the simple story that Michele thinks he’s telling and the more intricate one we can’t help reading through it. The nine-year-old’s voice is captured in part by Ammaniti’s use of tenses: Io non ho paura is narrated in the perfect (passato prossimo) and imperfect tenses, rather than the preterite (passato remoto) of ...”

“... Poems of Walter de la Mare, published in 1969, runs to almost nine hundred pages and includes more than a thousand poems. Of these William Wootten has culled 48, plus an extract from the late, long poem Winged Chariot. Each is followed by an astute and informative commentary that braids together relevant facts from de la Mare’s life, extracts from his ...”

“... across a continent has a certain raffish hilarity to it and once produced a study called Dylan Thomas in America. This book is a sort of ‘Dylan Thomas in Africa’, with the difference that Breytenbach has written this one himself and cares about the continent he’s travelling through and getting drunk in. As he ...”

“... 19th-century audiences by playing patriotic tunes on xylophones – have limited appeal. More than 200 councils have banned circuses featuring animals from their parks. But circus is moving away from the big top. Circus schools offer vocational courses and circus acts entertain at street and music festivals, motor shows and corporate events. The New ...”

“... the money to do so in some style. As he said, he was there because ‘I simply prefer Samoa.’ More particularly, he preferred the weather. Edinburgh, he had written in an early work, when he was still a prisoner in the city, has ‘one of the vilest climates under heaven ... The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a ...”