“... is identifiable only by the colour of its endpapers, or by the presence of a date on the title-page or verso. Joseph Connolly, who caters for bibliomaniacs of all kinds, has produced a useful and ebullient guide to children’s modern first editions. He’s perhaps not so sound an assessor of girls’ as he is of boys’ writers, leaving out, for ...”

“... gets out of hand. It is with a throb of misgiving that we encounter, on the book’s second page, a table detailing the 12 varieties of typeface employed in the Blackwood’s printing office in 1879. You get the feeling that, if he knew a little less about his subject, David Finkelstein might have written a better book. After ten years sifting the ...”

“... to global attention was one that Kleitman performed on himself. In 1938 he and a graduate student, Bruce Richardson, descended into the depths of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, where they spent the next 32 days a quarter of a mile from the nearest chink of daylight, maintaining an artificial sleep-wake cycle of 28 hours. They kept time with alarm clocks, took ...”

“... and slim, the hips they are attached to as ‘narrow and broad at the same time’. Almost every page amounts to tightrope-walking, whether nonchalant or fraught, but the most obvious consequence of the gender-withholding principle is that A***’s name must be constantly repeated, never allowed to soften into a betraying pronoun. Those recurring rows of ...”

“... seal them for ever. The total report exceeds six thousand pages. We have been shown only the 525-page summary, but any American can read it, and the director of the CIA, John Brennan, offered no challenge to the facts. Exactly 119 detainees were held at CIA sites in various countries from 17 September 2001 to 22 January 2009. It is the first official tally ...”

“... interpreter at the UN accustomed to focusing on the spoken word and immediate comprehensibility. Bruce Penman’s earlier translation, published in 1972, was already more than readable, but Moore goes further in reformulating Manzoni’s elaborate syntax and giving the narrative voice a strong spoken feel. Compare the way the two translators handle the ...”

“... in the room turned to stare, gazing at him ‘as if he were a statue’. By now, perhaps, too many page-three captions in the Sun and too many lectures from Andrea Dworkin have taken the impact out of the epithet ‘stunner’ and taught us to think of beauties as passive victims rather than masters of the gaze, but to the Greeks the idea that someone could ...”

“... Union really a consequence of rumours bouncing around in the ‘echo-chamber’ (the image is from Bruce Chatwin’s Utz) of a society deprived of free speech? How about glasnost? How about the heavy load of bureaucracy and ideology, the apathetic workers, and the ruinous expense of trying to counter (long after that ‘petering out in the ...”

“... him.’ From Salieri’s point of view, Les Danaïdes was an unqualified success. On the title-page of the score, printed in Paris shortly after the first performance, Salieri’s name stands alone. Its prominent dedicatory letter, addressed to the Emperor’s sister, Marie Antoinette, ingeniously plays out a further trope on the ‘sous la dictée de ...”

“... Therefore we pass it around the table and for some time thereafter we throw words all over the page. The facts are political. And it does matter. As Jennifer Dorn makes clear in her introduction to the Collected Poems, Ed published with persons, not publishing houses. There was always a firm engagement, a direct relationship carried through by regular and ...”

“... and unification) and to downgrade domestic Korean developments. It is one of the great merits of Bruce Cumings’s path-breaking work, The Origins of the Korean War (1981), that it reinstates the domestic component, making it possible to evaluate the background and credentials of the main political forces and leaders vying for state power throughout ...”

“... Beauty, Bluebeard’s wives, the Beast’s Beauty, the Little Mermaid and the Blonde. On every page, off-beat and often surprising variants challenge our assumptions about these old chestnuts. ‘As the beast is to the blonde, so the webbed foot or ass’s hoof of the storyteller is to Cinderella’s glass slipper.’ This wonderfully condensed summary of ...”

“... unknown, just rejected by the anthologists who anyway preferred poets. When I look at the contents page, I find that, of 38 names listed under ‘Contemporary Writing’, eight are women. Among the male names I do not recognise (my bad), one is a judge-poet and two are lawyer-poets, and this feels, to me, already distinctively Australian.On the other side of ...”

“... that summer, when a publisher neglected to put the name of the original translators on the title page of a work which Mandelstam had revised, so that he was denounced, unjustly, as a plagiarist. After gruelling court hearings and interrogations, a commission of the Federation of Soviet Writers’ Organisations found him morally to blame for the fact that the ...”

“... Hollywood actresses. I spent the fortnight before this year’s festival reading Frémaux’s 620-page Sélection officielle, an account of the year leading up to the 2016 festival, or as the publisher’s blurb has it, ‘a year in the life of a bulimic who loves to love’. On the cover, Frémaux stands on the red steps leading up to the Palais des ...”