“... oneself from the other people involved, or not without a traumatic, perhaps fatal break. This may seem a strange preamble to a consideration of the work of Natalia Ginzburg, a writer sometimes criticised in Italy for having restricted her comments on the highly influential, privileged and politicised peer group she lived among to accounts of their ...”

“... bank, he smoked dope, his hair was messy. Why couldn’t they see he was on their side?Christodora may bear a (real) building’s name, but the book itself seems still to be in search of a principle of construction. Despite the prominence of the Christodora in the title and the opening passages, this isn’t one of those novels that represents a building as a ...”

“... into a police car and spending nineteen months in prison.The corruption allegations against Lula may have been hazy, but those against his party were well-founded and damning. This fact is often lost in a soup of accusations and counter-accusations, and the general controversy around the PT’s dramatic loss of power since 2016. Did it lose power because it ...”

“... and the de facto fragmentation of Zaire is underway. In the end all these quasi-independent states may fail, as Ian Smith’s did, but equally, the map of southern Africa may look very different twenty years from now. The politics of liberation will certainly not be much like the ANC’s dreams in exile. Let us ...”

“... which should have gone east to Slavonia in autumn 1991 were diverted south to Herzegovina, which may have been threatened, but wasn’t fighting for its life. The Croat communities in Herzegovina declared autonomy from the government in Sarajevo; and when the Bosnian Serbs and the Yugoslav Army launched their war in April 1992, the bonds between these ...”

“... my men and boy friends, has been the one guiding principle in my life, and has inspired anything I may have been vouchsafed to accomplish in the nature of the influencing or the building up of character. There may be many comrade friends, there can only be one comrade wife.’ ‘His very sexlessness,’ Crawford ...”

“... end of Kipling. When copyright runs out, his work will be published extensively in paperback, and may or may not be read. Kipling is a writer between readerships: no longer anything like as popular as he once was, but not quite unpopular enough to be included in courses on Modernism or The Short Story. His reputation ...”

“... Rabelais never attacked individuals first. Even comic symbols such as Janotus de Bragmardo may be treated quite kindly in the end. But when the Sorbonne tried to censure Rabelais he mocked its syndic without mercy. When Calvin, the orientalist Postel and Gabriel Dupuysherbault (a censoring monk) attacked him, he answered back. The Tiers Livre shows ...”

“... of the lyric etc. The novel is in that sense always ‘lawless’, as Gide liked to say, and we may have to raise some questions when someone like Henry James comes along and offers to codify its new ‘laws’ in doctrines like ‘point of view’. Even though he is virtually absent from this book, for reasons I will come to, Faulkner offered his own ...”

“... in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from the Haymarket, and a large leafy residence out in Fulham, and a fancy coach to convey him between the two. Always the dandy, he might be seen in a ...”

“... wealth inherently destructive. Timon of Athens only just made it into the First Folio, and it may never have been performed. But if the austerity of the text denied it popular appeal, it became down the centuries a catalyst of radical thought. Timon’s great speech about gold (‘This yellow slave/Will knit and break religions, bless ...”

“... that Gef lived and talked and ate lean bacon exactly as the Irvings claimed he did. This may sound whimsical, but it’s an effective device for taking us back to a prewar Britain in which paranormal occurrences were widely believed, and somehow assimilated – by some, at least – into the texture of everyday life. However hilarious Gef’s ...”

“... is where the shame of nakedness landed and got stuck. The castrated horror that is the female form may provoke man’s impulse to point, jeer or debase but, as a psychoanalytical parable, it feels reductive here. In English, ‘shame’ indicates a kind of feeling bad: ostensibly about what you have done, but possibly about what you are. ‘Toxic shame’ is a ...”

“... things the Scots learned from the English was how to do imperialism properly. Paterson and Law may have been clever bankers, but they were terrible imperialists. Law’s calamitous attempt to exploit a monopoly on French colonial trade – the ‘Mississippi bubble’ – forced him to flee France in 1720. Paterson’s proposal to establish a trading ...”

“... that the division level agent for South-Central Iraq was fired by Bremer’s Baghdad office on 30 May 2004. That agent was Robert Stein. Yet he was allowed to carry on. ‘The division level agent made or authorised disbursements in the amount of $1,496,562 after his authority to make cash disbursement was revoked,’ the appendix says. He also approved ...”