“... some even burned alive, for same-sex relationships, while the loving sexual relationship between David and Jonathan in the Old Testament has caused generations of biblical translators to tie themselves in knots trying to conceal the obvious. Christ himself made barely any pronouncements condemning sexuality. This has not stood in the way of Church ...”

“... Sea and Summer is that it is a metaphoric reflection of Victorian society. It has the same plot as David Copperfield. When it starts, young Francis Conway is the child of a pretty young mother and an ineffective but still employed father. However, Dad immediately loses his job and commits ...”

“... David Mitchell’s first book, Ghostwritten (1999), which describes itself as ‘a novel in nine parts’, is a collection of loosely interconnected stories. The protagonist of one will have a walk-on role in the next; a minor character from someone else’s story will later reappear as the narrator of their own. The first narrator is a member of a Japanese doomsday cult, the perpetrator of a poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway, now on the run in Okinawa ...”

“... was born Stanley Martin Lieber. And the first issue of Superman was published, in 1938, by two young American Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. As Michael Chabon wrote in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), whose protagonists are loosely based on Siegel and Shuster: ‘Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? … Clark Kent, only a Jew ...”

“... had silenced it for generations.’ Not quite true, as it happens. In the mid-Eighties, Hugo Young did a radio programme on the law. Hailsham, the then Lord Chancellor, would not waive the rules, but Lord Templeman, a law lord who was effectively beyond his reach, went on the programme anyway and broke the taboo, which Mackay abandoned when he took up ...”

“... a song from his posthumously released ‘demos’ album Love Is Overtaking Me. It’s as if Neil Young had made not just the lilting Harvest Moon and the frazzled Tonight’s the Night, but also Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’ and Steve Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians into the bargain. What can they possibly have in ...”

“... last years of Mrs Thatcher’s reign it was Perec, not Sollers, who – with the publication of David Bellos’s translation of Life: A User’s Manual – found a keen British audience. There were logics in these things, as we shall see. Perec’s reputation might easily have crossed the Channel two decades earlier. His first novel, Les Choses, was ...”

“... phrase corresponding exactly to our ‘terra incognita’, a label unknown to Chinese cartography. David Selbourne was probably unaware of these fakes when he embarked on his translation of the text he now entitles The City of Light, but it is worth pointing them out, just to make clear that the notion that Italian manuscripts concerning medieval Asian travel ...”

“... it: ‘In a less confused world, his glory would be greater than his guilt.’ In a similar mood, David Thomson published a biography in which every chapter ends with a dialogue of self-examination by the critic, and in which Welles’s best-known innovation is side-swiped and helped to its feet all in the course of a sentence: ‘In truth, there was more ...”

“... Indeed, he complained about plans to publish some of the correspondence of his late friend David Hume, because it would encourage hacks and hucksters to ‘set about rummaging the cabinets of all those who had ever received a scrap of paper from him. Many things would be published not fit to see the light to the great mortification of all those who ...”

“... On 13 December 1938, the young writer Jean Stafford, visiting Boston from her hometown, Boulder, Colorado, agreed to go for a ride in his father’s Packard with her 21-year-old suitor Robert Lowell. They had met the year before at a Colorado Writers’ Conference, and Lowell had been courting her intensely through the mails ...”

“... Plato’s insecurities: ‘I was the best actor in the world, pound for pound – I mean the best young actor. I was really good, I had incredible technique, I was incredibly sensitive. I didn’t think there was anyone to top me. Until I saw James Dean.’ Dean kept to himself, locking himself in his dressing room between takes and refusing to respond to ...”

“... the poetry and the story of ill-fated love are inextricably woven together. Eventually, the young poet confronts us, as he did his embarrassed contemporaries, with disconcerting immediacy. Bampfylde was born in 1754, into a long-established Devonshire family. Generations of judicious marriages had brought the Bampfyldes extensive property and political ...”

“... She went to high-society schools, where she read Kipling to her boyfriends. She married a young Air Force officer, and became, in her twenties, an important personality in Washington society. Her main male friend outside her collapsing marriage was the Ambassador in Washington of the new Fascist regime in Italy, Prince Gelasio Caetani, an attractive ...”

“... when readers were alerted to her fiction by the commendations of two admirers, Philip Larkin and David Cecil. Having been out, she became ‘the in-thing to read’, and reviewers rushed to praise the late novel Quartet in Autumn – now in paperback – as if it were a match for her early work.* Meanwhile her early work has been reissued, including Jane and ...”