“... noire’. Brennan immediately set her sights on grander things than the fashion notes and short reviews she’d been hired to write. In 1952, her first story appeared; two years later, she had a piece in ‘The Talk of the Town’, the section of the magazine over which Shawn kept the tightest of reins. Brennan’s male colleagues, including ...”

“... the precepts of the virtuous life, good governance and the paths to spiritual transcendence. In short, the preoccupations we associate with Karl Jaspers’s Axial Age, roughly 750-400 BCE, the time of Confucius, the Upanishads, the Buddha and Socrates. But in Ge’s understanding of Chinese history, the Axial Age was not a time of radical transition from ...”

“... Ministry of Agriculture. What is rather surprising is that at least three of the characters – Philip Schnäbele, Jean-Yves Fréhaut and Catherine Lechardoy – actually exist, and have simply been plonked into the book. Understandably, they took it badly: they are represented, like many characters in Houellebecq’s novels, as pointless and ...”

“... text and intertext. But Riffaterre’s commitment to the structuralist project stops well short of dissolving the poem into a play of circumambient codes and conventions beyond all reach of formal analysis. His readings are squarely opposed to the current mood of ‘textualist’ euphoria which merges poem and commentary in an endless exchange of ...”

“... and its effects quietly naturalised as part of Theresa May’s new political settlement. Philip Hammond’s first Autumn Statement, delivered to Parliament on 23 November, confirmed that this is the ambition: none of Osborne’s major planned cuts was reversed, an overall budget surplus remains the goal (simply postponed from 2020 to 2025), planned ...”

“... is also, in another and less obvious way, highly theatrical. Ginzburg’s narratives proceed by short, numbered paragraphs, with minimal connectives between them. The device of enumeration, typically used since Spinoza to suggest rigorous logical deduction, here evokes dramatic sequence: scenes or takes for stage or screen. This a very effective way of ...”

“... Our house was often filled with peasant leaders, trade-union leaders, radical poets, essayists, short-story writers, and occasionally, not encouraged too much, members of the family, or old family friends. In Pakistan, the Communist Party was banned, and two of its leaders, Muslim intellectuals from India who’d been sent to fertilise the barren land which ...”

“... Short-term​ thinking has been the fatal tendency of the Conservative governments to which Britain has been subjected since 2010. David Cameron’s declaration in January 2013 that, if the Conservatives won the next election, they would offer a referendum on membership of the EU – which wasn’t a significant concern, never mind a priority, for British voters – is a fine example ...”

“... A writer, born around 1890, is famous for three novels. The first is short, elegant, an instant classic. The second, the masterpiece, has the same characters in it, is much longer and more complicated, and increasingly interested in myth and language games. The third is enormous, mad, unreadable. One answer is Joyce, of course ...”

“... My mother is such a bloody rambling fool,’ wrote Philip Larkin in 1965, ‘that half the time I doubt her sanity. Two things she said today, for instance, were that she had “thought of getting a job in Woolworth’s” and that she wanted to win the football pools so that she could “give cocktail parties” ...”

“... Spain produced at the court of Alfonso X. (An official attempt to canonise Rodrigo, initiated by Philip II in 1554, failed.) In the street theatre of the 17th century, El Cid appeared as Christ, with his widow, Jimena, as his patient bride, representing all who await his second coming.By the time Spain could be spoken of as a modern nation, Rodrigo Díaz had ...”

“... Rainbow (1973), though he has also published Slow Learner (1984), a collection of his early short stories, and another novel, Vineland, in 1990. He started work on Mason & Dixon just as Gravity’s Rainbow was winning the US National Book Award. It has taken him a quarter-century to cross the t’s and dot the i’s.Pynchon is famous for three main ...”

“... to make the ambiguous miracle of the father twice. It is clear that if the face behind were also short on life and lacked blood and resembled a mask, then the power of the first image would be reduced; it would seem like a failure, its inwardness merely like an absence of outwardness, a brute refusal to comfort the viewer or endear itself to us. There is a ...”

“... allows only subsidiary places to the strenuous translation of Psalms by Sir Thomas Wyatt or Sir Philip Sidney (the ‘Sidneian Psalms’ acclaimed by a poem of Donne) or Milton. Yet Donne himself, who worried whether poetry was equal to the expression of divine truth unless a divine spirit directed it, maintained that the ‘tropes and figures’ of the ...”

“... they’ve seen it start at zero! The corpse falls out of nowhere, you see!’ Hitchcock was just short of his 63rd birthday when Truffaut interviewed him. He had remained staggeringly inventive throughout a long, prolific and highly profitable career, and there were seven films yet to come, including The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). Two American ...”