“... of fiction as an autonomous category, neither factual truth nor reprehensible lies. As Philip Sidney would later put it, ‘the poet … nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.’ In Book 15, Boccaccio goes on to establish an Italian literary canon, seamlessly linking ancients and moderns, Latin and vernacular writers, culminating in ...”

“... and inquisitions and forced Catholicism.’ He had been derisive about and fearful of the short-lived first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, when there was ‘no quadrille d’honneur’ at the Court Ball – ‘probably it was feared the socialist ministers and their wives would be too clumsy.’ Those ministers were let off wearing ...”

“... This was 1938. He’d been working and living in Scotland, got married, then got a job. He was on short-term contracts when the war came. He moved to King’s Lynn and had some job to do with airfield runways – which there were a lot of in East Anglia. He was also in the Royal Observer Corps. Well, he’d have been then about forty. He was born in 1900. I ...”

“... The first half of the concert consists of several items of serious music, each usually fairly short, and sometimes includes the first performance of a newly commissioned piece. But during the second half, which is televised live on BBC1 and also watched and listened to by a global audience of millions, the mood of the evening lightens considerably, as ...”

“... and influence is sought in a periodic ballyhooing of the ‘trans-Atlantic alliance’, as in Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent (2008), which Niall Ferguson in an enthusiastic review claimed will ‘be read with pleasure by men of a certain age, class and education from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to London’s West End’. Ferguson himself is homo ...”

“... Wallace also started work on a new ‘long thing’, and in his lifetime published two extracts as short stories: ‘Good People’ in the New Yorker (2007) and ‘The Compliance Branch’ in Harper’s (2008). Since his death, there have been more bits in the New Yorker, and an archive of papers sold to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. And ...”

“... forty-plus books to his name (matching Theroux’s own tally), who narrates. Family life isn’t short of critics in literature, but it’s hard to think of a novel to match this one, where bitterness comes to seem an end in itself. The Way of All Flesh was certainly an act of revenge on Samuel Butler’s part (prudently delayed until after his death), but ...”

“... the finest poem he has written, is as hard a nut to crack as many an Empson poem, though it stops short of both the bafflement and authority of ‘Bacchus’. His affection for the language of science, and even more for the world of applied science, is Empsonian. The James who stated that the modern equivalent of a Donatello statue is not something by Henry ...”

“... sighted, overconfident rival, how to feel. More important, Lawrence’s fiction, in particular his short fiction, strives obsessively to make the invisible visible. In story after story, Lawrence writes about death or the moment of dying, of crossing over. In ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ (1925), a woman ensnared and drugged by American Indians begins to sense ...”

“... Alma Mahler, the novelist Hermann Broch, whose essay, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, is the best short evocation of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna there is, and his mistress, the wife of the art-historian Meier-Graefe. There was a host of minor literary and artistic figures of the Weimar era. The Frankfurt School, in exile, established itself at West 117th ...”

“... Quentin Skinner’s short book is an extended version of his Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. There cannot have been a less contentious succession to that chair. In his field, the history of political thought, Skinner has earned an authority and distinction unrivalled anywhere in the world among scholars now below retirement age ...”

“... Marshall and was excited by Hayek’s lectures and those of the brilliant Abba Lerner. But it was Philip Barrett Whale, who worked on international trade, who prompted Hirschman’s first paper and wrote him a reference for a professional life. So far, one might say, still not so unusual in the circumstances of the time. What particularly affected Hirschman ...”

“... In a wonderful short story called ‘Haha Huhu’, written in Telugu in the early 1930s, Vishvanatha Satyanarayana (1893-1976) describes an accidental traveller to England: a gandharva, a flying half-man half-horse from classical India, who loses his wings and crash-lands in Trafalgar Square. His encounter with English society as he lies captive in his cage and waits for his wings to grow back is an occasion for Satyanarayana to comment wryly on many things: among them, cultural difference, the nature of scientific progress, and the resources that Indian culture may still possess even though under colonial rule ...”

“... nature of literary truth. That’s the excuse, anyway. For a while in the 1980s it looked as if Philip Roth would never recover from this syndrome, this affliction of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a ...”

“... little art’, was commissioned. Her engaging memoir unfolds in unnumbered, untitled, unstructured short chapters: a pillow book on the translator’s love affair with words and writers, it ventriloquises Barthes’s late style of ‘biographical nebulae’, which aimed ‘to put a little bit of “psychological” affectivity back into intellectual ...”