“... at the old ‘push and pull’ religion. These canvases too are at the Barbican. They may not be Krasner at her best, but they are deeply touching; and their mixture of ferocity and nostalgia, homage to Cubism and impatience at any attempt to turn the style into a ‘method’, led throughout her life to the beauty she ...”

“... Love that caused Jeffrey Epstein to put her number into his book?’ I will now ask myself. It may be quite innocent: perhaps he got her number from somebody else; perhaps he asked her to a fundraiser; maybe she met him once and didn’t notice that the three girls behind him were 14 years old. The same question could be raised in relation to another ...”

“... some advantages: he liked the different viewpoint. After a final stroke in King’s at the end of May 1970, Forster died on 7 June. Nick wrote to me about his final days and funeral: He was worried and miserable during those last days in King’s, after his stroke, but not from fear of death, which he often said didn’t frighten him at all: I’m sure ...”

“... White Mike survives, and is revealed in an epilogue to have written the novel. McDonell may feel that this ending is a fair judgment on his characters; but I found myself increasingly warming to Sara and Jessica and Timmy and Mark Rothko, and wishing that White Mike would turn his 20:20 moral vision on himself a little more often. There is something ...”

“... Early in May I fly from Lagos to Abuja as part of a group of foreign journalists travelling to interview President Obasanjo, who has just announced that he intends to stand for re-election. Abuja, home to Nigeria’s political elite, was conceived just over a quarter of a century ago. A settlement of big hotels and uncompleted construction projects, it has little of Lagos’s eventfulness ...”

“... to appeal to readers in this country. Too South African? While I understand why this charge may be made against the book – however wrongheadedly – I also suspect it to be a cover for another, contradictory source of dissatisfaction with it: namely, that it was not South African enough. On that subject, more below. First, however, I must make clear ...”

“... In Desertion, Gurnah has on the whole made these wisely, and very tactfully. And, though it may be difficult, there are rewards. In his Guardian piece, Gurnah explains that he came to the gradual realisation that his own story, of ‘being from one place and living in another’, was worth telling, in part because it was ‘one of the stories of our ...”

“... not a form of ancestor worship? When Shakespeare’s mother telephones from England to announce he may have other relatives in Tasmania, he asks, ‘warily’: ‘Are you sure?’ A sentiment echoed by the reader. A second disgraced profligate great-great uncle emerges. Petre Hordern, a bankrupt gentleman farmer from Devon, is a sympathetic figure, but it’s ...”

“... it is not obvious that Meyer did ‘know’ the facts as Scull presents them. Indeed, the problem may be the obverse: that Meyer was unable, along with most others of his profession and generation, to perceive with sufficient moral clarity what was really going on. What comes through most strongly when one delves into this murky period is just how difficult ...”

“... summer 2003. Almost half of them died, and 19 women died in childbirth at checkpoints. Such scenes may now be avoided, but even under optimal circumstances – and it remains to be seen how comprehensive the withdrawal will actually be – there are vast obstacles facing the Palestinians. The most recent World Bank assessment of the Palestinian economy, for ...”

“... Cartier-Bresson’s photpgraphs on the basis of something which, in their excess of riches, we may also see in them: the testimony of an aware, clear-thinking man to a sociological, or historical, reality.’ Such obscurity, coupled with an insistence that the events he was close to (Mao’s victory in China, the death of Gandhi) were in his case the ...”

“... ourselves that there are other forms of discourse, and that they can be treated in other ways, we may turn to the Hungarian George Konrad. His earlier book The Case Worker has been highly praised, but I have not seen it. The City Builder, presented as fiction, is not a novel in any ordinary sense. It is not easily definable as anything else either: in ...”

“... intellect-sensation’ types. The hive needs us all. We poets are like the despised drones. You may not like us, but we scatter our seed, and the Queens are fertilised. It is a passage that suggests both what the novel is about and how it is to work. It also gestures towards a couple of interesting dilemmas which the author is to explore but arguably ...”

“... he said. The product of a Birmingham grammar school, Barnes became not only a good but one may say a great Trinity mathematician, influencing and teaching Hardy and Littlewood, the outstanding British mathematicians of the first half of this century. A research Fellow of Trinity, who had no idea that Barnes was a Trinity man, let alone a bishop, said ...”

“... contemporary, and seeking in chronicle an inverted form of augury. Or, less apocalyptically, we may end up as minor entertainers in light prose. Should that happen, the High Puffer’s boast that it ‘more history books were written like this they would drive novels off the market’ will be put to the test. And on the evidence of this kind of ...”