“... At college he was a maths whiz, and his readily provided assistance with calculus assignments may explain his friends’ loyalty, because he’s a vacuum of charisma. Yanagihara ostentatiously withholds information about Jude’s condition, deploying phrases like ‘those years’ and ‘what happened then’, along with creepy references to a Brother ...”

“... too, in her use of timings. It’s OK, apparently, to make events that occurred in the month of May 1962 happen, after all, in 1982. She doesn’t explain very clearly. The 1980s have their own problems, their own pleasures; decades have their own time and feel. But for Doris, not wanting to hurt feelings or wanting events to make more sense for her ...”

“... remained strangely ‘un-churched’. He wasn’t baptised until he was on his deathbed and may never have attended a service in a Christian church. But he gave the Christians what they wanted: he ensured that Christianity would no longer be ‘shunted aside as “un-Roman” or the practice of eccentrics’. Christians weren’t ...”

“... Center that the Rockefellers first commissioned, then destroyed, are now at MoMA again (until 14 May). At the time the show opened, Rivera was acknowledged, along with David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, as a leader of Mexican muralism, which was supported by the new government of Alvaro Obregón as a way to promote a transformed sense of ...”

“... evidence seems to contradict the model. In other words, Acton’s competitive advantage theory may have been useful for him to think with, but the Athens he describes in the specialised language his model requires could have been described and understood just as well without it. Laborious, and more than a little otiose, the assumed timelessness of the ...”

“... friend of Micòl’s ailing brother; and the narrator eventually comes to suspect that he may also be Micòl’s secret lover. (That conundrum is one among others in the novel that are never resolved; all that is certain about Malnate, ultimately, is that he is called up to serve in the Italian army, is dispatched to the Russian front, and never ...”

“... voices rise optimistically. The last chord, on ‘fry’, could be celebrating a wedding. ‘I’ may be freezing and burning, but sounds pretty well on it. Weelkes is again using the harmonies to contradict the words. Although the madrigal developed in Italy, the composers who created it came from the north: Philippe Verdelot was born at Les ...”

“... off to school at the age of nine, took the separation especially hard. The early dislocation may not have caused Arthur’s lifelong insecurities, but it can’t have helped. There was no question of giving Annie, the capable and energetic girl of the family, an English schooling. She gathered what education she could from her mother, supplemented by ...”

“... generally fear for his son’s stability in an adult and not comfortably Jewish world. The father may not be as crazy as he sounds; when asked to explain his anxiety, he replies: ‘It’s about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences.’ ‘Oh, Christ,’ Marcus says, ‘you sound like a fortune cookie.’ He will come to see that his ...”

“... when national legal systems are unable or unwilling to act. The potential crimes with which Saddam may be charged – torture, mass rape and murder, armed aggression, the use of chemical weapons, the mistreatment of prisoners of war and perhaps even genocide – are all proscribed by treaty and custom. They are international crimes in both severity and ...”

“... to New York, the announcement came ‘to kindly lower the window shades so that other passengers may enjoy the in-flight entertainment programme’. I demurred, and my window soon seemed a searchlight sweeping through the dark cabin, disconcerting those passengers trying to enjoy The Notebook. Why settle for Hollywood pap, I thought, when they had the ...”

“... way. First, though, he wrote a tremendously bad novel called The Dwarves of Death (1990), which may be a source of embarrassment: there’s no book called ‘The Midgets of Mortality’ on Michael Owen’s fictional CV. The Dwarves of Death is definitely interested in pop music, demotic and storytelling, but it’s a throwaway effort that seems to have been ...”

“... self-confidence, that Gordon Brown should be the only plausible candidate to succeed Tony Blair. 6 ...”

“... that we cannot hear the music of the spheres because of our muddy vesture of decay, but we may sense that order in starlit Belmont, at least until Portia and Nerissa arrive to tease their new husbands and allow slightly dirty jokes about their rings. The whole splendid act is still inexplicably sad, and, from the point of view of the basic story, close ...”

“... during the liberation war, and had seen a lot of violence, but now it was peaceful. His neighbours may be predominantly Zanu-PF, but Solomon eagerly took a copy of the anti-Mugabe Daily News I had with me. ‘I love this paper,’ he said. Before the fuel crisis, he told me, there might have been ten or more vehicles a day along the road where my car was. Now ...”