“... 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 ...”

“... scholarship took him. He managed to do well enough in his A-levels to get into Leeds University to read law, where he got a predictably disappointing degree. Both his parents were, in different ways, politically committed and Straw as boy and student had intense political interests. School and university provided opportunities not so much for learning as for ...”

“... and Guts in High School (1978), Great Expectations and Don Quixote, these books were impossible to read cover to cover. Her best-crafted work of this period is the completely linear, episodic Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978), and the contemporaneous story ‘Florida’, which turns the plot of the 1948 film Key Largo into farcical psychological quicksand. Acker ...”

“... about historical castrates, from the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian and the medieval philosopher Peter Abelard to Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato. The section ends with a letter arriving under her door, apparently written by the killer. Eleven more letters follow, signed with the names of female performance artists: Gina Pane, Lynn Hershman and ...”

“... One is the production of Michael Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, T.S. Eliot. They of course share a subject, the poet himself. But this choice of subject, the life of the writer with perhaps the biggest public image of any in our time, suggests something else they have in common. These two works ...”

“... beggar has a mean face, looks a crook or, as today, because he’s not doing a good job. 21 March. Read the hitherto unpublished extracts from Sylvia Plath’s diaries without much interest. I hadn’t known about Hughes’s homophobia – though I’m not sure that antipathy to Truman Capote can be so subsumed, Capote really deserving a phobia to himself. As ...”

“... spume that played upon the ghostly paradigm of The Anxiety of Influence when I turned the page and read: ‘Yeats wrote that “Plato thought nature but a spume that plays/Against a ghostly paradigm of things.” ’ However, this is probably what Bloom calls a ‘strong misreading’; the swerve from Yeats’s text doesn’t seem to me to help Yeats, but that ...”

“... hesitated to divulge the surprise of this ending, but the number of people under, say, 12 who read the LRB and have not read the Harry Potter books cannot be large.) The moment when Harry realises that he mistook himself for his father is quite powerful; and it is, after all, the only real kind of time travel there ...”

“... centuries, that of Tacitus’ little book was bleak. For the most part, it seems not to have been read or even copied, except at the great Benedictine house of Fulda in central Germany. There, in the middle of the ninth century, a learned hagiographer named Rudolf wove material from the Germania into an account of the Saxons – clear evidence that a ...”

“... of Berlin dangling her sons against various backyards, parks, untamed beaches. The first time I read her stories I felt inexplicably lonely, and then realised it was because I wanted to have already read them a dozen times. I wished to get to the point where we were companions, where I could open the book at any page and ...”