“... of Turgenev, who much admired her, seems never really to have caught on with the Russian reading public.Although there are one or two hard-drinking ladies in Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow Stations, it presents a man’s world, a world of booze. Completed in 1970 during the Brezhnev era, the ‘time of stagnation’, it was not published until the ...”

“... her). Crawfie was cast out of the femly. Her book does reveal a shocking amount about the girls’ reading habits: ‘There was in the bookshelves a complete set of Beatrix Potter’s books. One in Welsh!’ J.M. Barrie, something of an expert on children who never grow up, came to read to them at Glamis. Crawfie was the first of the Windsor grasses – in her ...”

“... send-ups of classical texts and mythological references to create droll, disorienting collages. Reading this early work was like being stoned in a taxi speeding through an unfamiliar city. The writings were disseminated as ‘mail art’, then distributed in chapbooks. She became the diminutive darling of a coterie of punk musicians, a few academic ...”

“... holds the key to the case. It certainly provides the key to the novel, or to understanding why reading it is such a joyless and baffling experience. Rivera Garza describes Pizarnik as a frustrated novelist whose prose writing lies far from ‘the linearity that is generally associated with fiction and beyond the field of influence of the plot’. She might ...”

“... he favoured. The latest biographical and interpretative analysis of Gould is by the psychiatrist Peter Ostwald, the author of interesting psycho-biographies of Nijinsky and Robert Schumann; a good amateur violinist, and a friend of the pianist, Ostwald died of cancer before his book was published, but was apparently able to finish his manuscript despite the ...”

“... were it not for the biographer looking over her shoulder. Almost as often, one finds oneself reading passages of straight reporting as if they were playing the tricks of a novel, using flatness to imply feeling, disguising as unruffled objectivity the chilled revulsion of a wife. For this is not, it must have leaked out by now, the traditional saint’s ...”

“... a ‘legendary period in movies’. In The Last Picture Show, Welles’s friend and protégé Peter Bogdanovich had made ‘a film for everybody’. The Godfather was an ideal merging of ‘commerce and art’. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets was ‘a triumph of personal filmmaking’ and a gripping thriller. For Sontag, these films were merely a case of ...”

“... was tried out for the treatment of illness. The medical literature of those years makes horrifying reading today: paper after learned paper recounts the benefits of bleeding, cupping, violent purging, the raising of blisters by vesicant ointments, the immersion of the body in either ice water or intolerably hot water, endless lists of botanical extracts cooked ...”

“... this kind of effect and those that are sought by Barry Cornwall in his ‘dramatic fragments’, a reading of which in French had given Pushkin his model. Very much in the spirit of the age, Cornwall had sought to wring every ounce of romantic melodrama out of the situations he treated. Pushkin does just the opposite: he arrests the mechanism of the melodrama ...”

“... the poem, as well as the Argo, is delayed by a long digresson on the origin of the Etesian winds. Peter Green, meanwhile, a historian of the Hellenistic world, has spent the best part of a decade producing his annotated translation and uses his excellent Introduction to zoom in on Apollonius’ use of the fantastic. All of them challenge the notion of the ...”

“... his sister had had to settle for being the sister of the Messiah. I thought of David often in reading Jeffrey Masson’s My Father’s Guru. In the conclusion of Final Analysis (1990), his comic and indignant account of becoming and unbecoming a psychoanalyst, Masson dropped some hints about his peculiar childhood, explaining that he was naturally ...”

“... may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which launched Oasis, whose founder, Alan McGee, gave ...”

“... from a single mind; the demands on vocabulary, and, less predictably, on syntax, that made the reading, for example, of Gregory Rabassa’s translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude such an enlarging experience. Translation upsets expectation, it extends the field of comparison, it forces even the sluggardly to re-evaluate and to re-contextualise. A ...”

“... future historians come to write about the 1983 General Election, these two books will be essential reading. One is a thorough compilation of the evidence, and the other a brilliant line drawing of a maverick who streaked dramatically across the scene causing all heads to turn and significantly affecting the outcome. I recommend to the researcher of the year ...”

“... altarpieces, among them the ‘Assunta’ and the ‘Pesaro-Madonna’ for the Frari and the ‘St Peter Martyr’ for Zanipolo, without which the development of Baroque religious painting would be inconceivable. At the same time, he painted his celebrated mythologies for Alfonso d’Este (among them the ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ in London), a cycle for which ...”