“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 Read the hitherto unpublished extracts from Sylvia Plath’s diaries without much interest.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 ...”

“... bathtub figures towards the end of the poem, when the Trojan hero Hector (as I will call him: Peter Green believes we should eradicate the familiar Roman equivalents for Homer’s names, so he calls him Hektōr) has been killed by Achilles (and, phew, Green calls him Achilles rather than Akhilleus: two cheers for inconsistency). Hector’s ...”

“... on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television. Meades has never been a fully paid-up architectural correspondent; he argues in Museum without Walls that taking up such a job ...”

“... her left nipple. In Europe, the print was interpreted as a scene of rape, but the critics didn’t read Japanese. In the text arranged in the space around the three entwined bodies, the shell diver exclaims: ‘You hateful octopus! Your sucking at the mouth of my womb makes me gasp for breath! Ah! Yes … it’s … there! With the sucker, the ...”

“... than scholar’, classed his enormous erudite books among the many that he refused on principle to read. John Evelyn, visiting Rome in 1644, was impressed when ‘with Dutch patience, he showed us his perpetual motions, catoptrics, magnetical experiments, models, and a thousand other crotchets and devices.’ He predicted that in a forthcoming book on obelisks ...”

“... testimony, power seldom looks alluring. The distended egos of New Labour grandees such as Peter Mandelson, and especially Prescott, float by from time to time, gas-filled blimps at risk of collision or spontaneous combustion. Mandy, prickly, imperious and unloved, falls, twice. Gordon Brown schemes to become leader, while his faction intrigues against ...”

“... appalled by the touch of a female. After a brisk march through the history of sainthood – from Peter and Paul to the Reformation in just ninety pages – Bartlett turns to a leisured exploration of liturgical commemoration, relics and shrines, pilgrimage, church dedications, personal and place names, images of the saints and literary genres, including ...”

“... that the text disappeared beneath the interpretation.’By contrast, the great merit of Peter McPhee’s new synthesis is the weight it gives to the earthy, even mundane, aspects of revolutionary experience. It examines 1789 from the peripheries, rather than Paris, as seen through the eyes of the menu peuple, rather than from the heights of the ...”

“... deeply confused about his sexuality, and at least part of his appeal to the teenage Ashbery, who read the New Directions edition of Poems not long after it was published in the US in 1941, was the combination of modernist obliquity and homoerotic undertones. ‘To a Man on His Horse’ and ‘The Tears of a Muse in America’ (whose original title, ‘A Muse ...”

“... Chamberlains, who live in Washington Square West, are recent transplants from New York City. Peter, a fortysomething local news anchor and Alix, a 33-year-old writer and Instagram influencer, are parents to Catherine, a newborn, and Briar, an inquisitive three-year-old. Their mother pretends she is still living in NYC, a trick maintained by means of ...”