“... In some of the more substantial pieces in the volume, especially ‘Political Autobiography of a Young Man’ (1960, 1962) and ‘Was I a Stalinist Too?’ (1979), Calvino gives scrupulous and painfully precise answers to these questions. Even in pain, though, his irony never deserts him – ‘irony always warns of the other side of the coin,’ he says in ...”

“... is hurt by the parting sinews And he looks up with relief, laying it on the scales. He is a rosy young man with white eyelashes Like a bullock. He always serves me now. I think he knows about my life. How we prefer To eat in when it’s cold. How someone With a foreign accent can only cook veal. He writes the price on the grease-proof packet And hands ...”

“... arsehole’ to one of his meaner conquests), the prototype of the selfish and self-assured young man, who when the book begins has just caught a glimpse of his intended next victim, Hannah, the stately and beautiful wife of the camp commandant. He, the commandant, ‘the Old Boozer’ Major Paul Doll is the second narrator-character, and really the ...”

“... In June 1494, a piglet was taken into custody in Clermont for having ‘strangled and defaced a young child in its cradle’. It seems that the suspect would have been confined in the same cell and treated in much the same way as a human prisoner, before being tried in front of a court ‘as justice and reason would desire and require’. Witnesses were ...”

“... sure of.’ By the end of this ingenious novel, he himself is sure of nothing. He is a taciturn young man with a languid grace, heavy dark eyelids and prominent lips – a sombre beauty with ‘latent fire which turned this picture of idleness into a figure of rhetoric’. Both Anne and Alexa love him because they believe they can ignite that latent ...”

“... more or less in peace as long as they provided troops to support further conquest. Giving up your young men to fight someone else’s wars was no doubt oppressive at first, but the Romans came up with incentives as they went along: not just wealth, but a form of half-citizenship (‘Latin rights’) that made possible such things as legally enforceable ...”

“... similarities between Roosevelt and Clinton, both of whom left the Presidency as relatively young men (TR at 51). From the outset, Roosevelt worried about what he would do following his term of service. Clinton is still sorting out his options, though his objective in Africa is the eradication of poverty rather than hunting big game, which topped TR’s ...”

“... when the question of Holocaust denial comes up, and Billy tells a story. Or rather Calista, the young woman who once knew nothing about movies, presents us with a dazzling mock-up of a screenplay that presents the story.‘int. café. day’, it begins. ‘A caption reads “Berlin, 1933”.’ ‘I’ll remember what I can,’ Calista promises. ‘And what ...”

“... this speech after reading the opening chapters of a novel by the protagonist of What a Carve Up!, Michael Owen (not the footballer). Michael, the author of Accidents Will Happen and The Loving Touch, is too experienced to be more than mildly affronted when a student finds his work insufficiently radical, but if his books ...”

“... system of thought.’ The reader will find all these items in the identikit portrait which Michael Tracey constructs. Greene was good to work for, and with, above all because he liked diversity among his associates. We were each perfectly free to weave our own views into a harmonious system of thought, if we wanted to, while he relied on his ...”

“... society: but more important, she has somehow got inside her Italian characters, so that when a young Englishwoman appears on the scene she really seems a foreigner and not, as one might expect, the focus of the novel’s consciousness. Imagination is part of the mystery; the other part is pace. This novel seems to impose its own slow pace on the ...”

“... it in easier dreams of liberation. Jean Genet was born in a Paris welfare clinic in 1910, to a young mother who gave him her name and, when he was seven months old, handed him over to a hospice. She died in 1919. A foster family was found for him in the market town of Alligny-en-Morvan. White suggests that contrary to much of Genet’s own mythology, the ...”

“... A young woman is shaken in her understanding of who she is and what she wants. The walking holiday she and her husband have planned now seems, Ian McEwan says, ‘a pointless detour from her uncertainty’. The phrase is full of trouble, of precise and elusive implications. Uncertainty is a path, a destination, a need ...”

“... well as a record label, bought the movie rights. The subsequent film, which starred Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, as well as Richard Pryor and Lena Horne, was a commercial and critical flop. But it became classic holiday viewing for many Black Americans, including my family. The Wiz is set in late 1970s New York, dingy and rundown, full of dilapidated ...”

“... memoirs of Hitler’s dog has achieved ironic elevation in Grass’s Hundejahre. Closer to home, Michael Hamburger has devoted himself to bringing German poetry before us and to maintaining its unity over time, space and civil warfare. Where, we must ask ourselves, do the books under review belong in the bushes that have sprung up along Hitler’s posthumous ...”