“... to prefer one of these books above the other: each has advantages, each is the product of hard reading and great literary curiosity. Like his predecessors, Gross has an Introduction in which he tries to say what aphorisms are: not quite maxims (more subversive) and not quite epigrams (more discursive). They are, as Johnson said, ‘unconnected ...”

“... is a strength to be built upon rather than a problem to be solved. Although she implies a good reading knowledge of French, German and Russian, Miller states that she is not bilingual, not a linguist and not a second-language teacher. She is, in fact, a university lecturer in English who has also taught that subject to London schoolchildren. We ...”

“... of Seven Gothic Tales. Putnam, the English publishers, had rejected the manuscript without even reading it. Haas had taken a gamble. In the event, Seven Gothic Tales was chosen as a ‘Book of the Month’ in the USA before publication. One cannot help feeling, however, that Letters from Africa should have been attributed to the woman who wrote them ...”

“... realise that he is, in his modest and quiet way, profoundly altering our views of the past. Like Peter Brown in his studies of late antiquity, he helps to free us from a Rome-centred view of the past, and allows us to recognise that the Eastern Mediterranean was the source of Western culture, and that the art of Ireland, Spain and Norway is as important for ...”

“... do if you’re a bachelor, or James Goldsmith, or a lesbian, or Welsh, or a good-looking nun, or Peter Parker, or a social worker, or a cat? You could always (well, not the cat) try taking Waugh to court. But who would want to stand up in the Old Bailey and declare himself not ‘the silliest man in England’? And who would wish to be measured and perhaps ...”

“... Hobbes’s observation that they are wise men’s counters but the money of fools. Consider ‘Peter Pantheism’. How marvellous a coinage! But what is it? Its creator, I suspect, had to scratch round for an answer before fitting it into one of his innumerable ‘Our Notebook’ columns for the Illustrated London News. When, towards the end of his ...”

“... love, art, democracy and anarchism that lurched between sharp insights and total nonsense. On reading it over [Lincoln] Steffens commented that it sounded much like the writing of Gertrude Stein. Quite so; and how much more difficult it must be to recapture the character of talk before the 20th century. Most of the contributors to Mr Quennell’s volume ...”

“... from various official papers that came his way. The autobiographical fragments are sometimes good reading. I particularly enjoyed Mr Sedgemore’s account of an interview between himself and Mr Callaghan’s chief whip, Michael Cocks, in the course of which Cocks rose from his chair and looked around the room: There were three doors off it – one into the ...”

“... people are an aspect of journeying, as in immortal books like Evelyn Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days, or Peter Fleming’s News from Tartary. Bruce Chatwin’s narrative is divided by pauses for quotation and reflection. He has more than a touch of Rimbaud in him, and indeed he quotes from Une Saison en Enfer: ‘For a long time I prided myself I would possess every ...”

“... reads her his school set books: Homer, Lessing, Schiller; and after that, War and Peace. ‘Reading to her, showering with her, making love to her, and lying next to her for a while afterwards – that became the ritual in our meetings.’ But the idyll is not perfect. Hanna is subject to unpredictable fits of pique and fury; once she strikes Michael ...”

“... with a short biography, in the recently reissued In ‘Vanity Fair’, by Roy Matthews and Peter Mellini).* When she was 20 she was painted by G.F. Watts, who was besotted with her and called her his Bambina. At the height of her notoriety she was caricatured in Punch and elsewhere. In her last days she had a deathbed photograph taken of herself, all ...”

“... the prewar voices most audible today belong to Auden and MacNeice. From the maudlin Tom and Viv to Peter Ackroyd’s unauthorised Life and Carole Seymour-Jones’s Painted Shadow, the collateral damage, too, has been heavy. Even now, much about Eliot remains opaque: 13 years after the first volume of his letters appeared, we can only speculate as to what ...”

“... hostility to Clark was demonstrated by two incidents not long after his death. In August 1993 Peter Ryan delivered, in the conservative journal Quadrant, an extraordinary attack on Clark’s six-volume History of Australia, which he had shepherded through publication at Melbourne University Press. He was, he said, ashamed to have published it: Clark was a ...”

“... with Aesop, whom Herodotus describes as a ‘logos-maker’ (logopoios). Herodotus, in her reading, is experimenting with literary genres, weaving Aesopic fictions into his history proper, and inviting his reader to feel the tension. With his mixed-race background – he was from Halicarnassus in southern Turkey – Herodotus apparently identified with ...”

“... a man without descendants, literally without aftergrowth. In Julie Orringer’s English, based on Peter Esterházy’s Hungarian, Kafka becomes a ‘barren man’, which in Laurent Binet’s French becomes ‘cet homme desséché’, this dried-up man. This man finally, in Tom McCarthy’s version, has a ‘dried-out … life’. The Vila-Matas story comes ...”