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“... sparingness in the matter of language perished with him. He died in 1941, just when Jean-Paul Sartre, homo loquax made flesh, was launching unscrupulously out on the seven hundred pages of L’Etre et le néant. And, fresh from reading Bergson, I find it frustrating that his sociable brevity, and the even more sociable clarity that went with ...”

“... school exercise book and becomes the conduit for a writerly correspondence; a disregarded copy of Paul Bowles’s Let it Come Down lolls on the counter of a pub, a gift already regretted; another gift, received from a stranger by the 17-year-old narrator while she is working on checkout 19 at the local supermarket, sits unopened by the till:I put the book on ...”

“... manners . . . so ancien régime’. Lévi-Strauss, meeting him afterwards on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, expected to be intimidated and found himself before a ‘principled old maid’: ‘That hairless face, those fine features, that light voice combined with the stiff, fussy manners, presented the almost asexual character I was later to recognise in ...”

“... the four Hoke Moseley books he wrote in the 1980s, has just been announced in the US; it will star Paul Giamatti, the shlub from Sideways. It’s really good casting. Willeford is adored by his peers and big-deal crime writers like Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block praise his work. ‘Nobody,’ Elmore Leonard said, ‘writes a better crime novel than Charles ...”

“... diamonds and pearls. Confident that my every word would be welcome, if not infinitely precious, I lay in my hospital bed with a happily expectant air. It’s hard not to see Updike’s tremendous output – more than sixty books over five decades – as the fulfilment of a filial quest. Linda had a bad temper, and administered ‘stinging ...”

“... a prominent role in the suppression of the Irish rebellion of 1798, whose ideological origins lay in the radicalism of Presbyterian Belfast, but which developed a curious sectarian momentum, becoming in many respects a Roman Catholic revolt. The rebellion raised union to the top of the political agenda, though Castlereagh had already begun to contemplate ...”

“... correction of ‘many manifest errors’ was important, the editors say, but ‘the greater task lay in the restoration through emendation of the syntactical coherence of individual sentences as they underwent periodic amplification under the writer’s revising hand.’ And again: ‘Overwhelmingly, the changes pertain to the syntax (the flow of the ...”

“... I have delayed and fussed, despaired and dithered, and rewritten the first half several times. Paul Strohm, to whom I went for advice early on, has written and published his own in the interim.1 But perhaps at last the mist is clearing. How does one write a literary biography of a figure from the long past? My slowness has been fostered by a jumble of ...”

“... in finding a position abroad. For the next five years, Cavell was governess to the children of Paul François, a well-off Brussels lawyer. The children remembered her as a kind and imaginative teacher, but also as very proper and very English: the self-repression that would strike later acquaintances had already marked her character. To her ...”

“... the emperor was trying to make. The focus of his book is the dissimulation and hypocrisy that lay at the heart of Roman imperial politics, and had in a sense been the foundation of the governmental system established by Augustus. In making one-man rule work successfully at Rome, after almost half a millennium of (more or less) democracy, and establishing ...”

“... the means. With the Church’s approval, this new warfare, to be engaged in exclusively by lay persons, became lawful and meritorious. How new is this element of the new history? All historians of crusade operate in the shadow of the German scholar Carl Erdmann, whose great book Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, or The Origin of the Idea of ...”

“... up in Coetzee’s critical essays, where it is likely to appear as offhand authority. A poem by Paul Celan, we learn in the collection Inner Workings, ‘absorbs from the Surrealists everything that is worth absorbing’. So much for those excitable fellows with their politics and their attempts to reimagine the world. I’m a devoted admirer of the fiction ...”

“... on Balzac, Fredric Jameson on Conrad, Julia Kristeva on Mallarmé, Edward Said on Jane Austen, Paul de Man on Proust, Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so ...”

“... of P&S slightly. Now there is room to show greats like Picasso struggle, and less-greats like Paul Signac shine. (The decision to begin with his wild Neo-Impressionist portrait of the debonair critic Félix Fénéon caused much consternation: that’s how fetishised the presentation had become.) One effect is to ease the expectation that every work be ...”

“... for a page or so, this arguable but highly contestable assertion – contested in particular by Paul Hamilton – about the main crux in Coleridge’s most important critical work, is never returned to, explained, argued for, and the problems it involves never acknowledged. Equally oddly, Holmes’s account of these definitions, which magically unified the ...”