“... and adult as everything else of Konwicki’s; and A Dreambook of Our Time, once chosen by Philip Roth for his Penguin series ‘The Other Europe’, but long unobtainable. (My own copy of it has gone missing, but I remember it as a slightly flowery rooming-house novel about zero-hour Poland.) It seems barbaric to ignore any books by a foreign ...”

“... in the 18th century, and Isabel Rivers’s essay explores how influential the Protestant Dissenter Philip Doddridge was with his monumental paraphrase of and commentary on the KJB, so huge that it was only posthumously completed two decades after he issued the first parts of it in 1738. Doddridge’s work was much plagiarised, and it might well have burst into ...”

“... to name the family dog Quintus, and dismissed War and Peace after a hundred pages because the French passages were annoying. On the superiority of bakers to writers, he has this to say: ‘A cake is a one-draft story. You don’t get to revise.’ ‘Pass-me-ups’ is what he calls the cashmere scarves that his mother inherited after his suicide. He ...”

“... then waiting almost thirty years before releasing another. Living in a Flemish port, he wrote in French: his liberal parents having migrated to Antwerp from Brussels. He was a poet, but he had to secure some source of income. October Long Sunday emerged from the tedium of military service and lengthy spells of convalescence. The state of enforced suspension ...”

“... Self and Lars von Trier with Carrington and Anna Kavan, as well as St Augustine, Giordano Bruno, Philip K. Dick, Walt Disney and J.R.R. Tolkien. Her cast of ‘imagined puppets’ ranges from the entertainers in Ben Jonson’s Bartholemew Fair, through E.T.A. Hoffmann’s weird Olympia to Karel Capek’s robots, and such lower forms of life as ...”

“... of the mix of Europeans who had begun to settle in the region. It was, after all, the collapse of French power in India following Clive’s victory at Plassey in 1757 which effectively opened it up to British dominance: as Browning was to put it, ‘the man Clive – he fought Plassey, spoiled the clever/foreign game,/Conquered and annexed and ...”

“... and ‘pictures’ rather than conventional theorems and proofs. As the historians of economics Philip Mirowski and Esther-Mirjam Sent have shown, however, it’s Mandelbrot’s relations to economics that are of greatest interest. Particularly fascinating is the way in which he was first embraced and then rejected by financial economics. The latter is a ...”

“... sense, the popular success of Górecki constitutes a threat distinctly different from that of a Philip Glass or a Steve Reich – not to mention Michael Nyman, the most candidly and astutely ‘commercial’ of Post-Modern British composers. Even at the lowest level, the real benefits (if not the cost-benefits) of performing Górecki’s Third are quite ...”

“... also an internationalist, deeply hostile to the Little Englandism of many of his peers, notably Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. He wrote a book about Czeslaw Milosz, translated many poems from Polish and Russian. In his memoir, These the Companions, he describes what he improbably calls F.R. Leavis’s charm, but the hero of the book is the Californian ...”

“... and the almost total absence of quotation from, or reference to, novels; the exception is Philip Roth’s The Breast. Yalom notes the works of a few Renaissance poets who wrote blazons describing the breast of the ideal mistress (among her other attributes), but otherwise ignores literature in favour of the graphic arts (anything from Rembrandt to ...”

“... until you see, far off, the secondary Downtown of the Galleria area, and the glinting monolith of Philip Johnson’s Transco Tower. Johnson is perhaps the most conspicuous architect in the Houston cityscape. He was brought in by the Menils, the city’s great artistic benefactors, and his later career is interestingly represented here. First there is the ...”

“... from the door in Rome when, with the fall of Napoleon, Ingres lost the patronage of the departing French Imperial administration. Many of the Grand Tourists who took home an Ingres drawing as a memento were young English men and women. These drawings – of single figures, sister and sister, brother and sister, husband and wife – would make better ...”

“... speak what I’ve made to the king./My tongue is the pen of a rapid scribe.’) The lute music of Philip Sidney in the 1580s: How long (O Lord) shall I forgotten be?      What? ever? How long wilt Thou Thy hidden face from me      Dissever? (13) And Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke, ten years later, bringing in the whole ...”

“... saw the light) of being saddled with the old assumptions. He points out that it is easy to be French without caring a great deal about wine, but it would still be silly to deny that there is a French culture of wine. In the same way, there need be no involvement on the part of any individual gay man with ...”

“... with the scenes where the Romanian takes off and abandons the farmer heartrending as the idyllic French film never is quite. In the days when I might have written a television film like this it would never have been put on and even today, epic of sheep-farming though it is, I don’t see it forming one of the Saturday night film shows they have in our ...”