“... Mesopotamia comes across as a sad place. Almanacs of the Middle East will tell you that it has its fair share of sunshine, but it is easier to imagine it under a leaden sky. Mesopotamia – Chaldaea, Sumer, Assyria, Babylonia, Iraq, or any other of its many names – consists of a patchy flood plain, without much cohesion and with wide-open frontiers on two of its sides ...”

“... The weightless characters who track about in Jean Echenoz’s novels are granted a sense now and again that that’s where they are, in someone else’s story, fulfilling burlesque routines not of their own devising. They’re not great thinkers, merely see-through functionaries of the plot. There’s a droll exchange marking one of these twinges of self-awareness in an early novel called Cherokee – named for the Forties song, not for the Native Americans as such – between the driver of a Deux-Chevaux and his captive passenger: ‘ “We could take you somewhere ...”

“... Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov spent eight years, from the late Twenties to the mid-Thirties, on the Solovetsky Islands: part of the time in a monastery fortress where, as we now know, the punishment included lashing prisoners to trees in summer to be eaten to death by mosquitoes, or tying them spreadeagled on heavy logs and letting them be crushed to death as the logs were rolled downhill ...”

“... The writer in France is having a good winter, whose autumn novel is no sooner out than it is being roundly abused on all sides for its dubious attitudes, and is then passed over by the jurors of the Prix Goncourt, who would rather argument turned, as by custom it does, on the forgettability of the novel they have picked, not on any bad smell given off by its contents ...”

“... The exploration of contemporary Irish politics is an exercise to be undertaken as gingerly as an afternoon stroll in the neighbourhood of Port Stanley, which is perhaps why relatively few political scientists have attempted it with any degree of confidence. Many of the things that happen, and many of the attitudes expressed, simply do not fit comfortably – or in some cases at all – into traditional categories of political analysis: no wonder the authors of one 1976 study quoted by Michael Gallagher in this valuable book described Ireland as a ‘persistent deviant case’: i ...”

“... Ted Hughes has always possessed in his poetry the gift that D.H. Lawrence had whenever he took up his pen: the gift of joining his ego to the visible world so that both not only energise each other but seem aspects of the same display. The first poem in this collection, ‘Rain’, seems to give the essence of what actually happens when rain falls and falls on a bare modern English farming countryside ...”

“... At one point in Thomas Peacock’s satire Melincourt, the heroine Anthelia offers a spirited sketch of the character traits which she looks for in a prospective husband. ‘I would require him to be free in all his thoughts, true in all his words, generous in all his actions – ardent in friendship, enthusiastic in love, disinterested in both … the champion of the feeble, the firm opponent of the powerful oppressor – not to be enervated by luxury, nor corrupted by avarice, nor intimidated by tyranny, nor enthralled by superstition – more desirous to distribute wealth than to possess it, to disseminate liberty than to appropriate power, to cheer the heart of sorrow than to dazzle the eyes of folly ...”

“... A classroom in a Merseyside school, 15 years ago; a warm autumn afternoon; 30 12-year-old boys in an English lesson, taken by a distant, severe, stooping man with, it is rumoured, a wooden leg. He is reading Great Expectations. Gradually the class loses its trepidation: drowsing in the sun-filled room, we allow our thoughts to wander from the text. And then the whole form shocked out of its somnolence by an explosion of rage: ‘HOLD YOUR NOISE!’ Shock gives way to guilt and fear: which one of us is the victim of this outburst? Another classroom, this time in East London, last autumn ...”

“... Suppose Mr and Mrs Coleridge to be young SDP yuppies today, who have asked us to dinner. What impression of each should we get? Of an amiable but very silly young man who talked too much and put on a great show of domestic warmth and solidarity? Of a capable and animated young woman, witty and elegant without being a show-off; devoted to the husband without making a display of it; admirable cook, makes all her own clothes? That would be about right ...”

“... The first thing a novelist must provide is a separate world.’ So Philip Larkin pronounced, and his two novels certainly provide one, as does his poetry. Is the same true of his friend Kingsley Amis, who hazarded the shrewd guess that Larkin published no more novels because he feared failure, in that genre, of the power to keep going with his own separate world of art? It seems likely that Amis has done something which in terms of the novel may be more difficult, and that is to carry the reader with him into whatever new places his interests or imagination have led him ...”

“... Howard Jacobson began writing novels late in life. As he tells it, the life was nothing much to write about. He was born in Manchester in 1942. His family was Jewish with a modest upward mobility track leading from Salford to Whitefield via Prestwich. The Jacobsons evidently made it to Prestwich. The young Howard went to grammar school and read English at Cambridge ...”

“... London now has an autumn season when the big fiction blockbusters are delivered to a public with longer evenings for reading and Christmas money to spend. It may not be anywhere near as clearly marked off as it is in New York and the launching machinery still creaks a bit, but its component parts are familiar from the smoother-running American model ...”

“... I first came across the name M. Ya. Azbel in about 1956. He was one of the three authors of a very remarkable paper, published in the Russian Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, showing how the electrical resistance of a very pure and perfect crystal of a metal might be expected to vary with direction in a high magnetic field at a very low temperature ...”

“... Thomas Bewick was a creature of paradox: an artist who laboured as a craftsman, a proud provincial whose work achieved national fame, a portrayer of the countryside who spent most of his life in an industrial town, and a rational man of the Enlightenment who fed the fierce streams of Romanticism. Thanks to four people – Bewick himself, who wrote a marvellous autobiographical Memoir, his two spinster daughters, who nursed and guarded his reputation with ferocious filial piety, and now Iain Bain, whose sympathetic but rigorous scholarship is epitomised by his two-volume monograph on Bewick’s watercolours and drawings – as much is probably known about Bewick, despite his minor status among the luminaries of British art, as about any other native artist ...”

“... By Soviet standards, the town of Sukhumi was a place of real pleasure: arranged about a crescent bay of the Black Sea, the climate warm even in October, with seaside hotels and restaurants. Those who knew the customs of the place, and had the money or clout to exploit them, could have a grand time here in the Georgian manner, drinking and feasting. A senior Georgian official I met while trying to get to Sukhumi told me of three and four-day feasts in homes or restaurants, in the course of which pigs would be slaughtered and a bear on a chain gave entertainment to the drinkers – by becoming drunk himself ...”