“... least innocent amusement.’ Shelley was aware of his reputation for high-minded solemnity – ‘Julian is rather serious,’ he said of his self-portrait in ‘Julian and Maddalo’, a poem of exquisitely high spirits that breathes his gratitude for Byron’s friendship and good humour. ‘Perhaps no one will believe in ...”

“... and stays fucked for the next five thousand years.’)His last novel, Purity (2015), featured a Julian Assange-ish anti-corruption activist, which allowed Franzen to go whole hog on the rottenness of techno-capitalism. When James Meek reviewed the novel for the LRB (24 September 2015), he argued that too much of it read like ‘extracts from workaday ...”

“... It is also a little odd of her to suppose that such businessmen as J.D. Allcroft, Sir Isaac Bell and Lord Armstrong (a newly created peer, and therefore quite properly middle-class according to Macleod’s definition) were slipping from the aristocratic embrace because they erected vast new country houses for themselves rather than buying old ones. On ...”

“... and everyone in the household tiptoed around him in the a.m. while he worked, until he rang the bell, his cursory unspoken cue, a servant would run up and hand him a glass of water, which he’d drink, and a newspaper, which he scanned. Then he’d pound on the wall, his mother would come and sit and converse with him, a happy helpmate, lunch, a long ...”

“... ever in Chipping Camden.’ This is all we’re allowed to see. ‘Is this frustrating?’ Julian Barnes asked in his introduction to the 2013 edition. ‘Yes. Is it unfair? A little. Is it calculated? Exactly so.’Fitzgerald’s working papers, held at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, reveal hints of the future she imagined for Chiara and ...”

“... he deplores the neglect of English art, blaming (among others) Roger Fry, who, with Clive Bell, ‘made it just fine to despise new English art in the name of the French avant-garde’: for them ‘any imitation of the Ecole de Paris, however pallid’ was preferable ‘to anything else, however strong’. In another essay, Hughes dwells on Howard ...”

“... in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (its category speculative neurohistory, at a guess), Julian Jaynes proposes that, at the time Pizarro and his men reached them, the Inca didn’t have full mental autonomy but only ‘protosubjectivity’. They functioned largely by a sort of automatism, acting according to unchanging patterns and ritual ...”

“... was a landscape of seclusion, symmetry and silence from which ‘the menacing voice of the church bell’ was banished and where flowers were discouraged. In contrast to his wife, whom he had soon come cordially to loathe, Sir George served his guests at most a small glass of Bordeaux and after dinner would entertain the gentlemen on a favourite topic, such ...”

“... principles, as Reith defined them in an apologetic letter to the Times after a talk by Julian Huxley had made a brief allusion to birth control. Scripts and songs were scanned for double entendres (notoriously, ‘winter draws on’) and newsreaders wore evening dress, though plus-fours were allowed in the office on Saturdays. Murphy, whose first ...”

“... Once in Kitale, Geoffrey, without his wife’s knowledge, withdrew the accusation of cow-bell theft and complained only that the Suk were without their kipandes. Was it necessary, or at least wise, to report the matter at all? Helen would testify that, with police encouragement, the settlers had become accustomed to dealing with ‘small ...”

“... key to the appearance of a writer’s work in another language; it may make their fortune: Anthea Bell (Englishing Sebald) and Ann Goldstein (voicing Elena Ferrante) propelled the authors to cult status beyond their own shores. Like a shrub moved to a sunnier position, writers may thrive when transplanted. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Human Acts have won ...”

“... at one of them, he could claim he had been in the other part of the house and hadn’t heard the bell. Haushofer divided her life after the war between Vienna and Steyr, a small town south of Linz, on much the same principle: she avoided notice in one place by being in the other. It allowed her to be two different people: in Vienna she moved in fashionable ...”

“... Keneally was also on the shortlist, with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River the clear frontrunner. Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would ‘skim out into the pampas’ the candidates he considered non-starters; back from Patagonia, there he sat at the Booker dinner, ‘a polite smile on his face’. ‘I couldn’t help ...”

“... the tools used were Kaplan-Meier estimators, developed in 1958 after Edward Kaplan, working at Bell Labs on the problem of vacuum tube survival in transatlantic telephone cable repeaters, was put in touch with Paul Meier, who was working on cancer survival using a similar method.) The use of these techniques in medicine and in the world of cancer is ...”

“... also, was that it he had lived a more cluttered life then Art, ‘that lifted rough tongued bell’, would cease to chime. When it did cease to chime, rather earlier than he’d thought, ten years or so before he died, he went on living as he’d always lived, saying it was all he knew.Striding down the library in the Monitor film Larkin thought he ...”