“... what to do with all the recurring figures, the CRO-riddle, Bucephalus the (s)talking horse, the white (shaggy?) dog, the valise that survives into the SF future, the polygraph. Any one of them might lead to the heart of the matter. Take the last. It comes up three times, first in ‘Pascal’: Jefferson is so beside himself with glee that he finishes off a ...”

“... He has also gained from the release of translator’s notes of the Vienna summit in 1961, from White House conversations taped by Kennedy (years before Nixon), and from the records of conferences on the Cuban missile crisis held in the late Eighties, which included key participants like Rusk, Bundy, McNamara, Gromyko and Dobrynin. He is therefore able to ...”

“... and park of circa 1700 in which we overhear a scene from Pamela, and then becomes a painting by Richard Wilson with figures from Peregrine Pickle. Thereafter we are led through Gainsborough’s Forest with a guest appearance by Sterne, Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a John Martin and a Turner, with snatches of poems by Wordsworth and ...”

“... she needed to. In addition to the stories and novels she wrote poetry, and a biography of T.H. White. She also translated Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve, was a devoted correspondent, and kept a diary running to 38 volumes. More surprisingly, she was a musicologist of considerable importance, as well as a knowledgeable gardener and a resourceful cook. Since ...”

“... of a theory to be found readily enough, in several forms, as in Stevens, Empson, Blackmur, and Richard Poirier. Poirier’s A World Elsewhere is a typology of American literature consistent with the acceptance of Emerson as its prophet. Empson didn’t write a theory of American literature, but he thought James’s later style distinctively American in ...”

“... Ionce​ asked the great historian Richard Southern whether he would like to have met any of the medieval saints and churchmen about whom he wrote so eloquently. He gave a cautious reply: ‘I think they probably had very bad breath.’ He may have been right about that, but it would be wrong to infer that this was something which didn’t bother them ...”

“... just over the house, ‘the noise of the machine gun . . . deafening’, and the ‘once white parachute, spattered with blood’ lying in the field next door with a dead German pilot beneath it. ‘I do think of you all each night,’ wrote Waveney the same month, ‘and wonder which of us is getting it.’ Her husband, Maurice, was a prisoner of ...”

“... upset perceived dichotomies. He has compared Skippy Dies to the mix of ‘bubblegum pop’ and ‘white noise’ in the Sonic Youth song ‘JC’. For The Mark and the Void (2015), about the relationship between a banker called Claude and an amoral novelist called Paul Murray, he drew on Barthes’s analysis of mythologies and Nietzsche’s idea of ...”

“... the eucharistic host), while the poor baked theirs from barley, oats or rye. At sea, officers got white bread while ordinary seamen had to make do with dry biscuit. There was also a hierarchy of meats: chicken, veal, pheasant and venison furnished aristocratic tables, while Harvey claims that beef was ‘only fit for labourers’. But this sounds ...”

“... In Pushkin’s introduction to Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, which is included in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of Pushkin’s prose, a friend of the deceased (fictional) writer, a neighbouring squire, says that after his death Belkin’s housekeeper ‘sealed all of her cottage windows with the first part of a ...”

“... nearest bushes, possessed by ‘a single unmixed instinct of fear for his young and happy life’. Richard Holmes’s impressive and absorbing Firing Line shows how accurately Tolstoy projected, in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being ...”

“... in the countryside and small towns, among butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers, farmers, white-collar workers and local government clerks. The reasons for this have also become familiar. Craftsmen and shopkeepers were squeezed between large capital and organised labour, resentful of both and attracted by the smallman anti-capitalism of the ...”

“... almost perfect lack of surface structure ensures that it strikes nothing that might end up in the white circulation of thought.’ On a long, fast ride, the run-of-the-mill cycling brain can turn the tiniest flaw into a grinding, unignorable obsession: ‘a pounding riff from a song, a bit of long division that starts over and over, a magnified anger at ...”

“... between interested parties on land claims. (The Aboriginal lawyer Noel Pearson once asked how many white people really wanted equality with black ones, given the life-expectancy statistics; on another occasion he shocked a TV interviewer by starting a sentence: ‘Now that I have entered the later part of my life ...’ He was 31 at the time.) The Native Tide ...”

“... tournaments for a while after the sight of the Minister of Health playing an all-night session at White’s caused a degree of scandal. The Treasury had been hoping to cut NHS funding but Macleod routed the attempt by setting up a committee to examine NHS expenditure: the crucial brief was written by two young welfare radicals, ...”