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“... is sufficiently good-humoured and various to accommodate a pleasingly disgusting horror story, ‘White Lies’, and a disarming comedy, ‘Algebra’, about a gentle homosexual who, to his own surprise, takes literary London by storm simply through flattering famous writers and inviting them round for little social evenings. If Theroux has a weakness, it is ...”

“... As she grows shabbier and thinner, the Americans in the village compare her to the witch in Snow White. But the thinness is sickness, and Kay, although her parents take their time to admit it, is tubercular. This plague also attacks the narrator, putting an end to his military service, and his camp university friend. It throws its shadow over the ...”

“... anti-vaxxer, QAnon, birtherism, Biden’s election ‘steal’.In the early 1960s, the historian Richard Hofstadter identified a ‘paranoid style’ in American political culture. The Whigs of the mid-19th century had emerged, at least in part, out of the Anti-Masonic Party, and the Republican Party that succeeded the Whigs in the 1850s was not only hostile ...”

“... Andrew Sullivan, ‘azza’ declarations – ‘as a colleague of David Simpson’; ‘as a white, middle-class male’ – in the age of identity politics. ‘Agonise’ is the right word here: every page of his book radiates anger, frustration and impotence at a situation in which the obsession with situation is itself the problem. For underlying the ...”

“... in Paris, but it is still the most impressive and among the most magisterially consistent. Richard Goy and Robert Berger, in their respective accounts of the construction of the Cà d’Oro and of Louis XIV’s Louvre, remove ambiguities which hang around the word ‘built’. They ask who made decisions, who paid, and how much, and why each building ...”

“... perpetually present – and never more so than in this almost incredibly vivid biography. Richard Holmes has a genius for the job, as he showed fifteen years ago in his biography of Shelley. In a sense, there is no need to bring Coleridge to life, but in this compelling narrative of those early years of the poet Holmes makes us seem actually to be ...”

“... up for Boris Yeltsin, or for liberating Haiti, or for building a bridge (to coin a phrase) to Richard Nixon. It is ghastlier still to reflect on the germ of truth that lurks in each conceited anecdote. Of the White House staffers who did not trust him and with whom he wants to settle accounts, the most prominent two ...”

“... lookalike’ parodied in Within Our Gates to the deliberate echoes of the NAACP Secretary Walter White’s undercover investigation of Southern lynching, found in The Girl from Chicago; for Green, the rival entertainers in Swing represent Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, the two poles of cultural autonomy and assimilation. In 1928, a combination of factors ...”

“... warmed by the Moonies’ unconditional support for him during Watergate, invited Moon to the White House, where the two men prayed together. Nixon’s fall was a grievous blow to Moon, who immediately set out on a campaign of extreme right-wing agitation to reverse what he saw as the decline into leftism inaugurated by Watergate. The Moonie ...”

“... or messengers. Ellison’s dream was of a different kind. His friends included the black novelist Richard Wright and critics like Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman; his heroes were Joyce and Eliot; he studied The Golden Bough for the mythical themes he hoped would make his novel immortal. Ellison aspired mightily and he dressed the part as he imagined ...”

“... before, when they were both eleven, and who now ran a tea plantation in Java, proposed by letter. Richard Turpin, on the other hand, had the advantage of being present in the flesh, and after a six-week acquaintance duly ousted the tea planter. Turpin was gay, which made for a tepid courtship on both sides. ‘Molly had been converted to Catholicism by ...”

“... Catherine, are not signs of paranoia: for Daud is a black Muslim from Tanzania, and most of the white locals are either patronising or unforthcoming or directly hostile about ‘coons and wogs and smelly niggers’. The special intelligence of Gurnah’s novel is to realise that the psychological damage caused by real persecution need be no less serious ...”

“... Hare’ and ‘Letter from a Far Country’, where much is said by leaving the rest unsaid. Richard Murphy, too, leaves a good deal unsaid. The price of stone is high, apparently, but he hasn’t computed it in detail; we are meant to leap from one assessment to the next. To begin with, it is the price of trying to build a house in granite, and then of ...”

“... the back or reverse side of time. ‘Tomorrow in the battle think on me’ is plucked from Richard III, and the evocation of Shakespeare (whose lines supply the titles of several of Marías’s books) is not the pretension it may seem. In Spanish, where one can multiply negatives without contradiction, Marías’s long sentences snowball with ...”

“... settle instead for ‘some of that store-bought stuff that comes in a big, flat bottle, brown, not white ... the kind of stuff white folks drinks’, he said yes, ‘If it held as much as a quart jar’, with mildly unpredictable (or, as Mr Warren alternatively suggests, perhaps predictable) consequences. What is a little ...”