“... but also, in a sense, its impending crisis. From 1970 onwards, the gulf between what Hayden White has called the ‘Absurdist’ and the ‘Normal’ tendencies in French criticism was to grow ever more considerable, with Barthes himself as the only token of what they had once held in common. Genette, co-editor with Todorov of the excellent magazine ...”

“... a quintuple heart bypass followed by a nervous breakdown – and then there was his split up with Claire Bloom (and Bloom’s subsequent exposure of the ‘facts’ about their marriage). At times, it must have felt like old times. Remember, post-Portnoy, that ‘affair’ with Barbra Streisand, whom Roth had never met? He still mentions it in interviews. All ...”

“... a model in which people of colour could vote and hold public positions, potentially exposing white and black US sailors to a more racially open society. These wrinkles aside, GTMO was a paragon of the ‘good neighbour’ relationship, a neocolonial arrangement in which the Cuban government and local elites, despite occasional grumbles, never challenged ...”

“... happened on one of the following. A room empty except for a stack of identical sheets of paper – white, sky-blue, or printed with a simple image of an unmade bed or birds in flight – or a mound of identical sweets wrapped in brilliant coloured foil, the sweets, like the paper, free for the taking. Or a space where office contents were dumped in the ...”

“... he has written memorably about (his influence can be felt in such recent novels as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth). But he’s never written about it quite as well as he does here: the grime and grit that drive the episodes of The Black Album, for instance (‘Two people lay end to end in a rain-swept doorway under a mound of newspapers and cardboard; empty cider ...”

“... to the posh pastness of her contemporary world; I would have relished, for instance, the ‘crisp white skirts and transparent blouses clotted with white flowers; ribbons, threaded through’ on the first page of The Last September. (Needless to say, this was nothing like my life.)And there was something so spiky in her ...”

“... president’s dirty mouth’ for failing to anticipate the inexpressive profanity revealed on the White House tapes. One of the high points of Roth Unbound is the extract from the tapes (recorded on 3 November 1971) in which Nixon considers his anti-Roth strategy: NIXON: Roth of course is a Jew. HALDEMAN: Oh yes … he’s brilliant in a sick ...”

“... producer, would have wanted Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in the leads. But Ford insisted on Claire Trevor and John Wayne (who wasn’t a star until this movie made him one). Dietrich and Cooper would have turned Dallas and Ringo into the natural aristocrats that Ford didn’t want; Trevor and the young Wayne assume no superiority. The aristocrat in the ...”

“... number of works that other scholars have been quick to praise as anti-slavery classics – such as Claire de Duras’s Ourika, of 1823, an ‘immensely powerful narrative on racial prejudice’ which nonetheless has ‘at best a tenuous’ relation to abolitionism. Many American and British historians have emphasised the moral wavering, inconsistency and ...”

“... from the film Avatar. The writers and interviewees in the fine catalogue of the show, edited by Claire Wilcox, include many collaborators and models as well as art critics, and they testify to the excitement of being made to improvise a different gait and posture, of being restructured, altered in scale and in relation to the space their bodies ...”

“... there’s been a wave of enthusiasm for ‘experimental fiction’. A new crop of writers such as Claire-Louise Bennett, Kevin Davey, Will Eaves, Eimear McBride and Eley Williams, all published by independent presses, started to attract attention, and there was a flurry of excitement about writing that departed in some way from the conventions of realism ...”

“... they passed to Ellen when she was 21. The Pilgrim editors summarise and endorse the case made by Claire Tomalin in her biography of Ternan and by other scholars that Dickens put up the money. He also wrote to theatre managers in London and Paris to try and advance the performing careers of Fanny and Maria Ternan. When he has doubts about accepting a ...”

“... What is this? ‘Two miles behind it a jet of white steam was travelling from the left to the right of the picture.’ It is a train, viewed across a valley, in Jude the Obscure (1895), and it is the only sentence offered there about this train. Flaubert is always described as the great cinematic novelist, the great novelist of detail, and indeed Flaubert has his own described train-steam too – similarly seen, in L’Education sentimentale, across fields, but ‘stretched out in a horizontal line, like a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away ...”

“... House galleries in search of the satanic Pence and Pelosi accompanied by his squat, shouting, red-white-and-blue-bandanna-wearing mother. Give ’em hell, Mommy! We’ll hog-tie and hang ’em!And finally – we shouldn’t go there but we can’t help it – the guy in Viking horns and face-paint. Now, lesbians aren’t supposed to like men at ...”

“... of me to find all this unfunny. After Williams’s poison-brew, Peter Benson goes down like dry white wine. Yet The Other Occupant is a lesser book than the novel he published last year, A Lesser Dependency, both in the sense of being less ambitious and less well-written. A Lesser Dependency set out both to document and to imagine the dispossession of the ...”