“... novel, not a puzzle, and the reviewer need not be too shy of revealing the plot. The martyr, Richard Alderman, is a dull, decent father, an insurance man with two sons, a wife and a chic, youthful mother-in-law, more classy than himself. (I visualise them as something like the families in Rebel Without a Cause.) ...”

“... associated with his ‘rules for writing’. Published as a slim book in 2007, they’re usually read in an abbreviated form excerpted in the Guardian. The rules don’t really tell you how to write a good book and have probably led to more than a few bad ones. They encourage a specific kind of minimalist approach (‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite ...”

“... connected with an Edinburgh publication, the Mankind Quarterly. Lane is particularly useful on Richard Lynn, a professor at the University of Ulster, who is cited 24 times in the book, but whose research will strike many readers as questionable. The authors maintain that there is an accurate unitary measure of general intelligence, named g, first isolated ...”

“... Richard Flanagan trained as a historian, and his novels have often emphasised the redemptive power of memory. For his characters, though, remembering is a strenuous business. There are traps to be avoided and barriers to overcome – an obstacle course of crying jags, guilt-ridden stupors, deathbed hallucinations ...”

“... Richard Holt begins his book on French sport with two misleading observations. In the one, he recalls that when, in the course of his research, a pile of books on football or on cycling arrived on his desk at the Bibliothèque Nationale, his neighbours were bemused by his reading material. How extraordinary that he never seems to have found himself sitting next to one of those readers who begins his day’s work with a careful perusal of L’Equipe or Paris-Turf ...”

“... series which concerns his finances, letters to his legal adviser, William Pyne, and to his tailor, Richard Culverwell. There has been a long upper-class tradition of owing money to one’s tailor – which, no doubt, explains the inordinate prices charged in those days. Disraeli, characteristically, went a step further and actually borrowed money from his ...”

“... Zero, the proposed tallest building in the world. I saw a headline in the Los Angeles Times that read: ‘After Levelling City, US Tries to Build Trust.’ I heard that military personnel were now carrying ‘talking point’ cards with phrases such as: ‘We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all.’ I ...”

“... is a vivid account of ‘the wagging of tongues’ as the washing went on. Thus, of Clémence, we read: ‘The cheeky beggar had her say, some dirty word or other, over each article; she laid bare all the misfortunes and all the misconducts of the customers, joking over all the holes and all the stains that passed through her hands ... so that, at every ...”

“... nor colloquial usage. The absurd sentence follows two lines later. ‘Twice have drowned,’ we read (the first person being understood), ‘thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.’ Eh? ‘Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.’ I see. Or rather, I don’t. In common with most likely buyers of this book, I cannot ...”

“... to Mamet, are the so-called professionals, the producers and writers and directors who haven’t read their Eisenstein and think movies are about character, and following actors around with a camera, and who can’t read movie scripts unless they are puffed out like bad novels, full of what Mamet calls ...”

“... is the biographer to make of this? ‘In December of 1819 he began to keep a list of books he had read.’ Very convenient for Richardson, but a mixed blessing for his readers, since great blocks of his book consist of these reading lists. ‘He was reading ... he loyally read ... he was reading in all directions ... he ...”

“... much like a blurb for her book. To be postcritical, she tells us, is to ask new questions when we read and to answer them in a new vocabulary. The impulse to do so comes from dissatisfaction with two dominant readerly positions: ‘the furrowed brow of the scholar deciphering an intractable subtext and the blissful mien of the subway rider devouring a ...”

“... pleasure today just as it did to those fuddled dons and sleepy schoolboys who first heard James read them by the light of a single candle in the provost’s lodgings at King’s College, Cambridge, or in his last years, as provost of Eton. It may seem heartless or unsporting to deconstruct these little tales, for the author made no very exalted claim for ...”

“... a lengthy visual and aural collage, a sort of television series trying to forget about television. Richard Brody describes the result as ‘a kind of working through on screen of the network of associations that formed in Godard’s movie-colonised unconscious’. The key idea here, which appears again and again in French thinking about cinema, is ...”

“... walls. The balance of forces is just as likely to shift in the other direction. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers looked to contemporary sculpture for the ethos of structural transparency they applied to the exterior of the Pompidou Centre. Some artists in the 1970s, such as Michael Asher or Iain and Ingrid Baxter, had already begun stripping back the spaces ...”