“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... duck.The human population in the park changes, too. There is a rumour that the number of young Australians and South Africans in Southfields is in the tens of thousands. Whatever the figure, it has been enough to change the culture of the park. Solidly built, barefoot, in long baggy shorts and T-shirts, they play touch football, throw ...”

“... in the world of food, in a course designed to appeal to the clever and curious and artily-minded young. So here it is: SPU27, an acronym standing for Science of the Physical Universe 27. Spelled out in English, the name of the course is Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science. The person who thinks it’s funny that SPU sounds like ...”

“... that final shifting of tents. Yet Monty’s scholarship was a puzzle to some. One of these, as Michael Cox recounts, was Lord Acton: ‘You know Montague James?’ he asked a King’s man. ‘Yes, I know him.’ ‘Is it true that he is ready to spend every evening playing games or talking with undergraduates?’ ‘Yes, the evenings and more.’ ‘And ...”

“... in only four years: ‘The bodies, now mumia, had been those of slaves and other dead persons, young and old, male and female, which he had indiscriminately collected.’ In 1546 the German physician Leonhard Fuchs still regarded this new form of mummy as disreputable, complaining of ‘the gory matter of cadavers received evidently from the gallows or ...”

“... after the league shut down in March. Fans and players retreated to their homes and watched Michael Jordan instead. The basketball podcasts I listen to paused their endless speculation about the shutdown and the possible resumption of play (later that summer, the league finished the season in a bubble at Disney World in Florida) and gave in to nostalgia ...”

“... One day in 1993, I found myself on a bus in Oxford with Michael Foot. He looked shambolic even by my standards – donkey jacket, stick, long hair all over the place. But nobody minded. You don’t often see leading politicians on a bus and passenger after passenger came up to say hello. He smiled and was the soul of friendliness ...”

“... and his ‘fidgety ghost’ – the phrase comes from one of his Pericles-inspired poems, ‘Young Prince of Tyre’ – still haunts Australian poetry. One pictures the poet lugging a battered second-hand typewriter from flea-pit hotels to temporary lodgings, watching through sleepless mosquito-plagued nights (‘Now/Have I found you, my ...”

“... Jill Saward’s ghost writer, Wendy Green, has done this ingenuous or idealistic or immature young woman – she presents herself as all three – the service of finding a flat, uniform and very nearly monotonous style to describe the lunchtime nightmare of 6 March 1986. It’s a style which perfectly suits the banality of evil, and such is its economy ...”

“... Tiepolo,’ Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall write, ‘is not a difficult painter. He is accessible and easy to like.’ Well, up to a point. For example, while I did not find the Tiepolos in the Royal Academy’s exhibition of 18th-century Venetian art ‘difficult’ in any obvious way, I did not find them ‘easy to like’ either ...”

“... Jerry says, as Joe drags him out the door. More recently, in Entourage, the HBO series about a young movie star and his gang, we see how the agent-as-harbinger-of-comic-confusion has become, in the modern era, the agent-as-conductor-of-cosmic-chaos. In Series Two, our young actor, a Hispanic on the brink of ...”

“... for Roubiliac’s statue of Newton ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’; Newton a young man and unwigged so that his head seems quite small and (appropriately) apple-like. We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the ...”