“... evidence as to his age and appearance was contradictory. More than 130 suspects are listed in Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner’s authoritative The Jack the Ripper A to Z (1991). Curtis claims that Ripperologists have ‘brought us no closer to the real culprit than did the exertions of Scotland Yard in 1888’, but he is unduly dismissive of ...”

“... but no crabs or waffles. Food sells: reviews of archaeology (prehistoric food), science magazines (man and his food), journals consecrated to the transdisciplinary study of sociology, anthropology and semiology (‘towards a biocultural anthropology of food’). There are the entrepreneurs of popular high food, Gault and Millau, who tell how to throw a banquet ...”

“... Camus was in charge of the paper’s literary pages, and one of the books he reviewed was Jean-Paul Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée. He immediately recognised that Sartre shared his own concern with the ‘absurdity of life’, but he was also impressed by Sartre’s suggestion that we are by nature ‘tellers of tales’, constantly transmuting our ...”

“... always rich in oil but poor in ink. But there were other cultural achievements beyond printing de-luxe editions of Cuban classics in the very young Caribbean republic. One must not forget that Cuba was the last colony in America to become independent from Spain. This happened only in 1902, and after that the small island was submitted to some sort of ...”

“... up and ‘that exotic star’ Olga Mara sweeps out, accompanied by her latest husband, the Baron de la Bonnet de la Toulon. Olga walks up the red carpet with a sternly decadent stare, her dress a simulacrum of starlight on a spider’s web. At a party after the screening, the boss of Monumental unveils the first talkie to ...”

“... by Minister Farakhan. Some campuses, like Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, and Macalester, in St Paul, Minnesota, are served by bookstore-cafés, which double as literary salons; others inhabit a wasteland of thrift shops and greasy spoons. Faculty lifestyles and manners vary widely as well. At Queens College, in a polyglot borough of New York, we dined at a ...”

“... the artist, drug addict, bisexual and sometime boxer Alvaro ‘Chile’ Guevara; Reginald de Vaulle, ‘a cross-dressing women’s fashion designer who had picked up a coke habit in New York’; Captain Ernest Schiff, ‘a man-about-town with a suspiciously German surname and a Teutonic habit of filing his ...”

“... Troubles before: her story ‘In Silhouette’, from her collection The End of the World is a Cul de Sac (2021), gives us a teenage girl’s view, charged and slippery, of an IRA killing carried out by her brother, Thady. The story’s intimate second-person perspective keeps our attention trained on the protagonist, so that the details of Thady’s ...”

“... Affair. In a series of interviews conducted with Didier Eribon in the late 1980s and collected in De près et de loin, he spoke of being bullied at school, and of his embattled sense of difference as a member of a national community that didn’t fully accept him. It’s tempting to imagine that this alienation was what led ...”

“... The celebrated designer instantly cracks up; he is helicoptered without delay out of 55 rue de Babylone to his exquisite château in Normandy and thereafter flown by private jet to his palatial hideaway in Marrakesh, accompanied by his pampered dog and perfect servants. Once there, he locks himself in one room, refuses to eat for weeks, drinks two ...”

“... last arrived at a small valley, on the far ridge of which were some shacks. ‘That,’ said the man who’d brought him on horseback from the river boat, ‘is Nueva Germania.’ Macintyre had come to look for descendants of the Saxons whom Elisabeth Nietzsche and her husband had brought there in the 1880s. He put ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ into his ...”

“... has been consistently beloved, with approval ratings above 60 per cent. He is both a dashing man of adventure and a political idealist – the closest thing present-day France has to a Malraux. His reputation even survived his support for the invasion of Iraq. In February, however, the country’s most celebrated investigative journalist published an ...”

“... For Gissing,’ Paul Delany notes, ‘writing was a grim and lonely task, made grimmer by one of the most disastrous family lives of any English writer. At times this misery threatened to become contagious.’ This confession comes at the end of Delany’s engaging new biography of George Gissing, and suggests the special difficulty of spending long periods in the company of the English novelist most known for the relentless pessimism of his novels and the self-destructive tendencies of his life ...”

“... about the articles he published elsewhere, or his scholarly books, lectures and essays. Defending Paul deMan’s rather slim academic publishing record – his first book, Blindness and Insight, appeared when he was 51 – Kermode says that in view of the density and strangeness of the work, and of its author’s ...”

“... had stood by him since falling down the stairs, and emitted a belching roar over a middle-aged man sitting with a woman on one of the green leather seats. Alan Sillitoe. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ‘Belching roar’ is, I think, bloody good (you notice that Sillitoe is writing so plastered that it reads as if it’s the poor old temptation that ...”