“... the Center for Writers and Translators in Paris (other volumes in the series are pieces by Lydia Davis and Alan Jenkins and a forthcoming work by Paul Muldoon). One of Pevear’s test cases is a sentence in which Tolstoy repeats a phrase with apparent (or indeed perhaps real) carelessness: ‘Nine days after the abandoning ...”

“... subway,’ she writes in a note to ‘The Night Has a Thousand Eyes’: ‘I conjure Crane, Miles Davis, Muriel Rukeyser, Julia de Burgos and Paul Goodman, or their descendants.’ Poems are dedicated to René Char and Tina Modotti. On the page the poems are mosaics of quotes, all the voices running to and from each other ...”

“... he was sixteen.Is Gigi the reason English-speaking readers don’t much bother with Colette? Lydia Davis suggests it might be, in her introduction to Rachel Careau’s new Chéri. Another reason may be the quality of some of the translations of her work: Roger Senhouse’s widely used version from 1951, as Careau points out, has phrases like ‘Oh, my sainted ...”

“... can detect echoes of his jaundiced vision in Jordan Peele’s recent horror film, Get Out, and in Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout. But, as if it were his destiny to remain just beyond the pale of literary approval, Himes, unlike Baldwin, flunks the contemporary ‘woke’ test. As much as he deplored the prejudices of the black bourgeoisie and aligned ...”

“... Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis (2012) – highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a shoestring, got right to business: ‘How do you write a review for Partisan ...”

“... cells. A major disappearance is the railway bridge that once carried, along with promos for George Davis and Reggie Kray, passengers from Dalston Junction to Broad Street: a lovely aerial view of industry, canal, domestic and commercial property, Shoreditch to City. You saw, precisely, where you were. For a token fee (often no fee), you became a privileged ...”

“... sexual encounters. But thanks to the anti-communist hysteria gripping Hollywood, he met Nancy Davis. She was a Chicago socialite and graduate of Smith College who had come to Hollywood in search of stardom but also – more important – a husband. Falsely accused of communist sympathies, she sought exoneration from SAG and took a shine to its ...”

“... pp., £12.99, February, 978 0 8223 3938 0) An Inconvenient Truth: A Global Warning, directed by Davis Guggenheim Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, edited by Alex Steffen (Abrams, 596 pp., £24.95, November 2006, 978 0 8109 3095 7) Funny Weather: Everything You Didn’t Want to Know about Climate Change but Probably Should Find Out by ...”

“... a lecture delivered on Irish radio in 1995 and published in The Great Irish Famine: The Thomas Davis Lecture Series, James Donnelly remarked thatthroughout the rest of the Famine years, the Gregory clause or ‘Gregoryism’ became a byword for the worst miseries of the disaster – eviction, exile, disease and death. When in 1874 Canon John ...”

“... police pepper-sprayed students as they protested silently against higher tuition fees at UC Davis. A subsequent investigation, forced on the authorities because a student’s photo of the scene had gone viral, established that the police had been sent in by the university chancellor, Linda Katehi. In a later statement, Katehi explained that she had ...”

“... no idea what their procedures were. That is perhaps the only excuse for Henry James, who wrote to Paul Bourget that Wilde’s sentence to hard labour was too severe, that isolation would have been more just.’ Close to Wilde’s release date, the governor of Reading Gaol said to Ross: ‘He looks well. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a ...”