“... been a resistance, at least among psychoanalysts themselves, to thinking of their work as mind-reading or fortune-telling. Despite the fact that most ordinary conversation is exactly this, or perhaps because it is, psychoanalysts have wanted to describe what they do as different, as rational even: dealing with the irrational but not dealing in it (‘On ...”

“... and tells us a lot about why he interprets Mozart’s life in the way that he does. Solomon’s reading of Mozart’s music is governed by a single idea: the subversion of paradise by reality and death – et in arcadia ego. In his early output, Mozart explores the possibilities of the serenade, a genre whose ‘predominant character is ...”

“... of idolatry’) is a master of such sound effects. The young Brown played a recording of Eliot reading his poetry ‘so often and so loudly’ that his mother and sister ‘began to go about their housework chanting chunks of The Waste Land and Murder in the Cathedral’. The Waste Land’s ‘Magnus Martyr’ and Eliot’s most famous play must have had a ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... seine fishermen of Long Island whose way of life was being extinguished in the mid-1980s, just as Peter Matthiessen was at work on his account of it? ‘These doggedly independent men,’ he tells us, ‘do not speak of themselves as “working”, far less “taking a job”.’ He quotes one of the younger generation: ‘Fishin wasn’t a job, it was your ...”

“... postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of this group, but gained instant recognition within it. It was her natural mode to épater les bourgeois, starting with her ...”

“... truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of love and delight that survived the longest. When ...”

“... landscape at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. I should be out there now. I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd’s notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage, a source of spiritual renewal. ‘The river itself becomes a tremulous deity,’ he asserts. I carried Ackroyd’s epic, Thames: Sacred River, as I made a ...”

“... of going on.Murdoch became world famous as a novelist, and is the subject of a fine biography by Peter Conradi, but the lives of the others are not so well known. Anscombe, Murdoch and Midgley all came from middle-class families in suburban London. Their abilities were evident early, and they were encouraged to go to university. Not so Foot. Philippa ...”

“... mettle in the towns, where they could prepare for government once the Red Army had come through. Peter Conradi handles this material extremely well, and draws on E.P. Thompson’s lectures in Stanford in 1981 about his brother, later collated by his widow, Dorothy Thompson, as Beyond the Frontier. E.P. is more committed than Conradi to the idea that Frank ...”

“... a well-publicised theory that Jewish Bolsheviks were behind the troubles in Ireland. According to Peter Martland’s commentary on the MI5 files recently made available at the National Archives, Joyce also joined the ‘K’ society, a.k.a. the ‘Inner Organisation’, a shadowy group of thugs who specialised in disrupting Communist meetings. These were ...”

“... it plain he ‘would not return alive’. Using the alias ‘Omar Hakim’, he also accompanied Peter Arnett and Peter Bergen of CNN to the caves. Bergen was sufficiently struck by his intensity and intelligence to talk about him in his book on al-Qaida, Holy War Inc; only later did he become aware of al-Suri’s ...”

“... to Lydia Davis, say?) and the letters are not interesting in themselves, but they are worth reading to hear how much more herself she is in the stories. In the letters, curiously, she sounds like just anyone. She even goes through that phase where you open with salutations like ‘Hello you no good wenchy slut’, drawn for some reason in rose-garden ...”

“... him to manipulate, in this case with Traubel’s help, the disposition, recovery and subsequent reading of important documents, a process that creates some measure of suspense and unpredictability in an account of the final years that might, over so long a work, degenerate into a record merely of illness and decline. The mess functions as an archive for the ...”

“... that ‘their glimpses of ordinary life communicate instantly across the centuries’; but then reading any great literature, as Carey says in the encomium with which he closes his autobiography, ‘makes you see that ordinary things are not ordinary’: like Chesterton, another of his heroes, Carey professes an ‘amazement at normality’. Ordinary things ...”