“... He was 76; I was 23. I was unmarried; he had just married again. This may be significant. I said goodbye, and he enclosed my forearm with a huge hand of undiminished grip. Without looking at me, he said: ‘Wenn der Putz steht, liegt der Seichel indrehd!’ In other words, which you may possibly need: ‘When the cock ...”

“... it all look a lifetime later? The returning Wolf Cub met a dignitary whose proud visiting card said ‘Rajah Jan-Alam, Sherqulah Punial, Where Heaven and Earth Meet’. The old family bungalow in Gilgit was now occupied by a general but as he was absent there was no obstacle, other than two nervous guards, to prevent a quick snoop round. The same plants ...”

“... knew their limitations. After being absorbed into the art-world mainstream, under the patronage of Edward Steichen, he began to make a play of them. One page of Naked City (1945), his first collection, displays a pure black rectangle. A reproduction of a fully developed sheet of blank photographic stock, it is captioned: ‘This is unexposed film of Greenwich ...”

“... each phrase in her poems seemed to query the last, to ask of almost anything she saw, or said, or heard, or overheard: ‘Really?’ The last poem in The Invention of Hunger looked at that spinner of fine lines, the spider, ‘three storeys high … intently/and so purely alone’, and then exclaimed: ‘I’m not like that!’ Armantrout had, by ...”

“... door had more TV channels than her. ‘That’s because she’s got a Smart TV, mum,’ my brother said. ‘We could get you one and you’d have all the channels you want.’ The following week it was all set up and Gerry was showing her how to use the remote control. He told her that she could pause the TV while watching Coronation Street to go and make a ...”

“... the reputation of Isaiah Berlin stands like a lion in your path. But the task of confronting said lion is not at all easy or simple: by no means as much as the preceding paragraphs may have made it appear. True, he was simultaneously pompous and dishonest in the face of a long moral crisis where his views and his connections could have made a ...”

“... while I was still working on my thesis, I’d had an unsuccessful interview in Washington with Edward Teller, who was recruiting for Livermore. He made an odd comment about preferring physics to politics. It was only much later that I realised my interview had taken place the day after he testified against Robert Oppenheimer. Another thing I didn’t know ...”

“... In her introductory essay, Marina Warner mentions W.W. Jacobs, James Stephens, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Harry Graham: a reading-list which suggests a mix of the commonsensical and the fantastical which consorts easily with the insect-headed humans and other macabre juxtapositions of Max Ernst’s collage illustrations – much of what is here was ...”

“... Can a literary magazine, however important, be said to have played a fundamental role in the development of a national culture for almost half a century? Can one really say that Argentine culture has ‘developed’ over those same years? Is there, indeed, such a thing as a clearly definable Argentine culture, and if so, what does it consist of? These questions are not discussed in John King’s otherwise informative study of the Argentine literary journal Sur, from its inception in 1931 to its slow death in the Seventies and Eighties ...”

“... hard that ‘one deviation from chastity should so absolutely ruin a young woman.’ Not at all, said Johnson. ‘It is the great principle she is taught. When she has given up that principle she has given up every notion of female honour and virtue.’ Like Eve before her, she has by one wicked act disordered the entire fabric of social happiness and ...”

“... whose handsomely-produced list seemed ubiquitous in the north and also quite affordable. ‘Ah,’ said my host, ‘but X is only worried about where his next Chinese carry-out is coming from,’ We cultivate literature on a little Egg Foo Yong? It seems we do. Later the London publisher, now ingested by the statutory multinational, required a reprint, and I ...”

“... next day. When we asked him about his ability to sleep so well under the circumstances, Snowden said that he felt profoundly at peace with what he had done and so the nights were easy. ‘I figure I have very few days left with a comfortable pillow,’ he joked, ‘so I might as well enjoy them.’ Glenn Greenwald​ expresses his bafflement and the reader ...”

“... working on Ti Amo, six months before he died, it wasn’t with a novel in mind. (Ørstavik has said that she considers her book a ‘report from a moment in time’ and that it was her publisher who designated it as fiction; Norway doesn’t have a strong tradition of literary memoir.) With its day-by-day accounting of caregiving and anxiety, Ti Amo ...”

“... It was late, Mallory was tired. ‘I could see him getting ready to ask his question,’ he said later. ‘On the spur of the moment I replied: “Because it’s there.” ’ A bored New York Times reporter covering the lecture noted down his answer – or perhaps misheard it, such things have happened – and the news agencies flashed it around the ...”

“... short story ‘In the Author’s Footsteps’, in his new collection, Is This the Way You Said?* Here an obstinately backward-looking rambler uses old maps and guidebooks acquired from second-hand bookshops to plan his assaults on present-day England. Guided by a volume from 1949 entitled Buckinghamshire Footpaths, he decides to hike to Milton ...”