“... in their 23 years of marriage, I didn’t even reply.’ But the narrator is replying now, in the more than four hundred pages that follow. The father’s name is Federico, or Federí. The cover of the book shows a detail from an oil painting by Federico Starnone, Operai che pranzano/I bevitori (‘Workmen at Lunch/The Drinkers’), made in 1953. The ...”

“... Thomas Carlyle was quite fond of the Chartists – until they opened their mouths. In an essay on Chartism published in 1839, the Sage of Chelsea harangued the political establishment and spoke up for the stoic dignity of the English working man: ‘Chartism with its pikes, Swing with his tinder box,’ he wrote, ‘speak a most loud though inarticulate language ...”

“... tradition: no wonder all her serious work steams with the clash of battle between aspects of life more easy for us to feel than to define. It is evident from the complex weave of her novels that it can have been no more easy for her to intuit the central implication of any one of those conflicts – she never trod an ...”

“... natural disaster of the 20th century, with 17 inches of rainfall in a few hours, gusts of 125 mph, more than 150 deaths and thousands of injuries. It was the only occasion when the orderly room clerks were issued with live ammunition. The wind had blown down the walls of the local prison and seventy inmates, some of them due to be hanged that week, escaped to ...”

“... and the west, in the old and the new world, are to be found traces of this custom; in some places more, in some places less, but among all and in a certain degree.Others did not share his sense of wonder. In 1835, the American sailor William Torrey was shipwrecked in the Marquesas, where he claimed to have been captured by ‘cannibals’ and forcibly ...”

“... century and within a few years the city had become the wealthiest in the Russian Empire, producing more oil than the United States. Immigrants flooded in, turning a desert town in Azerbaijan with a population of 14,500 in 1872 into a metropolis of 143,000 inhabitants by 1903. The newcomers included Nobels and Rothschilds and thousands of poor Jews attracted by ...”

“... leave to my son a curse as the almighty dollar.”’ Carnegie might well have wondered whether Thomas Mellon, in passing on his huge fortune to his son Andrew, had not bestowed on him a curse rather than a blessing. The two families made their fortunes in Pittsburgh after emigrating in the first half of the 19th century: the Mellons from County Tyrone in ...”

“... The Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) once said: ‘You have to understand that in my writing the musical component comes first, and the subject matter is secondary.’ It’s a strange thing for this professional controversialist and Austropathic ranter to have said – that we should attend to the form, balance and measure in his work, when everything in it would seem to lead to the giggle and gasp of hurt given or received, or the hush and squeal of scandal – but it is sound advice ...”

“... the entire second term of the Obama administration, a consensus has taken shape online and also in more traditional arenas of American political activism and cultural production. Inspired by the disproportionate impact of the economic collapse of 2008 and by growing awareness of the failure of the policy of mass incarceration as well as scores of high-profile ...”

“... Alice Thomas Ellis has a delicate touch with her fictional delinquents. In The Birds of the Air, her second novel, Sam, the nearly criminal son of a respectable academic couple, reveals all those conflicting qualities that make the young offender so hard to deal with and to understand. We feel at the same time revulsion and a sneaking admiration ...”

“... torture and mutilation, and keeps poverty at bay by theft and the sale of contraband, or, in more mature organisations, by kidnap and racketeering. In time, leadership concentrates in the man whose mastery of the idiom is the most complete, and he becomes the ‘godfather’, his authority protected, outside his immediate family, by a perimeter wall of ...”

“... family to behave. Sarah Waters’s novels – the first three set in the Victorian era, the more recent two in the 1940s – have always been interested in the ways in which English society has disposed of its more awkward or inconvenient members by locking them away in various kinds of institution. The secondary ...”

“... not experience the same condition in the life that they are just embarking on. The point applies more widely. Wallace does not discuss abortion, but anyone who is glad to be alive must be grateful they were not aborted. This has led some victims of congenital disabilities that are prenatally detectable to oppose prenatal screening, which can result in ...”

“... make an interesting study: James Joyce dreaming of becoming the agent for Irish tweeds in Trieste, Thomas Mann musing that he would have made a good banker, Samuel Beckett contemplating a career as a pilot. ‘I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot,’ Beckett wrote to ...”

“... a body that has ceased to work has, it would seem, few useful applications – its dysfunction more manifest than the sexual and familial forms that fill our tabloids and talk shows. But a body that doesn’t work is, in the early going, the evidence we have of a person who has ceased to be. And a person who has ceased to be is as compelling a prospect as ...”