“... 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 ...”

“... repeated fact about someone’s life is that a famous person was best man at their wedding. Dylan Thomas did the honours for Lynette Roberts and her groom in 1939, wearing a ‘smart brown suit’ he borrowed for the occasion. ‘I carried wild flowers and gave Dylan a bunchful of wild flowers for his lapel,’ Roberts recalled. ‘Vernon Watkins’s trousers ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him. Biography now belongs to the margins of historical writing. The economic and sociological determinism of the 20th century has questioned the influence of great men, while its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... during the Second World War, overseeing the team that made the Normandy landings possible. More than a third of the book is taken up with Austin’s five years in the army, and with the achievements he never talked about, even to his wife. Rowe has produced a marvellous book, which manages to be both exhaustive and thoroughly absorbing. It ...”

“... Thomas Sheridan, the father of the more famous Richard Brinsley Sheridan, devoted himself in the 1760s to ‘rubbing away the roughnesses of the Scottish tongue’. His volume of Lectures on Elocution was once a great hit in Edinburgh. The other Thomas Sheridan, known as Tommy to the tabloids and to friends and enemies alike, is the former leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, and his efforts to represent himself in a defamation case against the News of the World has been providing the city with a theatrical spectacle the Edinburgh Festival will struggle to equal ...”

“... has made monotone what was polychrome, are indigo (blue), gamboge (yellow) and brown lake (purple).Thomas Girtin was born in 1775 and died at 27, perhaps of asthma, although nameless dissipation and even sitting sketching on cold ground have been given as possible causes of death. What he achieved in his short life shows how various the tasks undertaken by a ...”

“... have been forced over the last few years to recognise that Bentham’s idea of government was far more sophisticated than the particular pieces of legislation usually labelled Benthamite. Now a remarkably thorough investigation of his life and writings emphasises and develops what Keynes pointed out forty years ago: that there was much ...”