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“... for a hundred years or more, Bardic Romance was a major form. Forgotten now, or doomed to be read only by critics, books like Miss Severn’s Anne Hathaway; or, Shakespeare in Love enjoyed mass appeal in Victorian England. One fatuous confection by Robert Folkestone Williams, The Youth of Shakespeare, went through six editions in three countries, besides ...”

“... As the unwary traveller hurries into Heathrow’s international bookstall hoping to light on a good read for the plane, his eye is assaulted by a thwacking array of swastikas on black, gold and blood-red fields. Approaching them at random but with a certain circumspection, he finds, for example, Philippe van Rindt’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler, in which it is revealed that Hitler survived his attempts at suicide in the bunker; The Murder of Rudolf Hess, by Hess’s Spandau doctor, demonstrating that the prisoner who the other day celebrated his 85th birthday is not Hess at all, but a small Nazi only too glad to avoid vengeance from his fellows by impersonating the great in perpetual concealment; James Pool and Suzanne Pool’s Who financed Hitler?, which opens with a luxurious gathering of bankers and party ‘higher-ups’ with their sleek women, just a shade less exotic than the gathering in a Japanese restaurant of Spanish-speaking kameraden that begins The Boys from Brazil ...”

“... Yes, I would have been tempted to think Lodge was over-egging it too, if I’d happened to read his essay only a couple of months ago. But then I read High Fidelity, and started seeing exactly what Lodge meant. Just look back at the very top paragraph of this review. How much documentary detail we seem to have picked ...”

“... is a symptom of schizophrenia; it is a form of telepathy. I thought Ronald Reagan could read my mind. In 1979 I had been reading Kafka’s love letters and as a result wrote a letter that I didn’t sign, telling a history undergraduate that other students masturbated while thinking about her. Years later Mr Reagan referred to this young woman as ...”

“... not the kind to whom you could confess your desires and ambitions. It’s actually refreshing to read a biography that doesn’t assume that the real point of the genre is to show us the ‘real’ person, and assumes the ‘real’ person is to be found in hitherto unrevealed depths of feeling, but it’s probably harder for a biographer to be confident of ...”

“... burden tends to drain them of ordinary kinds of biographical interest, as if we are not allowed to read the novel of Freud’s life for the story alone. One consequence is that his biographers can still routinely leave a reader wondering what Freud was like (not to mention what it felt like to be Freud). Two new biographies, one French and one American, ask if ...”

“... the New Fiction Society, Goff has laboured with the dedication of a fanatic to make the British read quality novels – something that does not come naturally to them. It has been a long haul, but with the Booker Prize, Goff has succeeded magnificently. A large segment of the public now uses the Booker shortlist as they might the selections of a book ...”

“... And the other Amis? – they are examining the candidates (not all of whom they can possibly have read) rather than the judges. If I were Mr Ron Pollard of Ladbrokes (whose odds have got a great deal meaner since the days when some of us cleaned up on Salman Rushdie at 14-1), I would give only cursory attention to the books on the short-list: instead I would ...”

“... the Drum office: Lewis Nkosi, Bloke Modisane, Arthur Maimane, and the photographers Bob Gosani and Peter Magubane, Winnie Mandela’s friend, now in New York; Can Themba, whose home in Sophiatown was known as ‘The House of Truth’; Casey Motsisi, who began one column, ‘No nooze is good nooze, but no booze is sad nooze indeed’ – a sentiment warmly ...”

“... naive solution to the critical problem posed by the book was found not by a literary man but by Peter Kapitsa, the Russian physicist, who enthused about the ‘brilliant form, the tragic content’ of Yerofeev’s offering.Tragic content? Aha, then that’s all right! But in fact there is nothing tragic at all about Moscow Stations. Russian literary ...”

“... of displaced identity, ‘Wakefield’, and Thoreau’s Walden (‘Were he to find the patience to read the book in the spirit in which it asks to be read, his entire life would begin to change’). Throughout, characters get somehow disconnected and dwindle, or are caught up in others’ schemes and projects, till the ...”

“... the reading habits of Henry, the song sequence’s screwed up protagonist: O Henry in his youth read many things he gutted the Columbia – the Cambridge libraries – Widener – Princeton – the British Museum – the Library of Congress but mostly he bought books to have as his own cunningly, like extra wings. he resorted to the Morgan for ...”

“... a Tory MP, and died a hero on the battlefield in May 1917. Val had two sons, the elder of whom, Peter, b. 1907, inherited the tendency to be a paragon, and the younger of whom, Ian, b. 1908, inevitably became the family handful. Things were not helped by the wills of Val and Robert, which absent-mindedly or maliciously left the boys’ mother, Eve, with not ...”

“... Greece were the two most common foci for this nostalgia, and Lawrence was avid for both. He read Aristophanes in the desert, and his last book was a translation of the Odyssey. But it was the Middle Ages (or his idea of them) that really got to him. He read Malory’s Morte D’Arthur repeatedly, together with ...”

“... translated and so is the resulting translation. In the longest chains, therefore, the last item we read is a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation. The dust jacket mentions Chinese whispers, we might think of the Surrealist pastime Cadavre exquis, and within the book Jonathan and Mara Faye Lethem ...”