“... of ventriloquism – or automatic writing – whenever his grandson puts pencil to paper. Couto may owe a debt to Latin America, but a greater influence is an African view of the world in which the boundaries between the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural, are not so much blurred as irrelevant. Anyone who has grown up in Africa will be ...”

“... Louis Stevenson, Tennyson, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Conan Doyle, Du Maurier, and plenty more. Her literary memory is a compendium of every syllabus in Victorian literature that could be contrived. Alice is the woman in white, or Lewis Carroll’s little girl lost in a ...”

“... The 11-year-old found raped and possibly murdered next to a canal in a small town outside the city may or not be the girl in the newspaper in the prostitute’s room; according to the post-mortem report, she was wearing a red frock at the time of her death, like the girl on the cover. What do these connections add up to? As if to uncover their significance, a ...”

“... Blair arrived breathlessly one day before catching the train at Euston. The piece he delivered may have required more ironing than Rushdie’s, but it too, in October 1987, found its place in the paper’s pages. He wrote that Mrs Thatcher ‘will wield her power over the next few years dictatorially and without compunction’ and further predicted that ...”

“... in a storm, imprudently swears that he ‘will see home tonight, in spite of the last tempest, or may I never see home!’ He is doomed to wander the back roads for decades, until a travelling merchant takes pity and escorts him to New York City, which is in the process of becoming the great American entrepôt of the 19th century. Poor Rugg is completely ...”

“... and around the bend of King’s Cove Bluff full of timber, Ford chassis, rock salt. Kleinzahler may here seem to assume the all-registering consciousness of the Williams of Paterson, but Williams felt compelled to develop some kind of representative – even epic – meaning out of Paterson’s history, while Kleinzahler is at leisure to savour the rank ...”

“... to the point where ideological affiliations play an overt role in judicial appointments. Tribalism may soon become the determinating factor in White House decision-making as well, for George W. Bush and his entourage don’t deal in shades of grey. As far as they’re concerned, the distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, us and them, are ...”

“... serious about it, with the one o’clock news. Dilworth contacted me for the first time in May. He described an artwork he wanted to undertake, a ritual for the night before Midsummer’s eve. He was going to climb a mountain on the neighbouring Isle of Lewis and trap a phial of air. This was interesting, as news of the what-are-you-up-to-these-days ...”

“... ruin as an expression of violence and blind hatred is not Woodward’s subject, however hard it may be to avoid the connection. His interest lies in the questions raised by empty spaces. ‘When we contemplate ruins,’ he writes, ‘we contemplate our own future.’ Filippo Brunelleschi was doing just that when, a Florentine, he arrived in Rome in the ...”

“... his voice and said ‘Sir, you and I have sat here with a board between us now for 27 years. May I venture to ask your name?’ The reply from the other side of the board was: ‘Sir, you’re a very impertinent fellow.’ The ingredients are good enough, but the finished product puts one in mind of a tasty bread made without enough yeast. Langford’s ...”

“... done in classical myth, the great model, of course, being the conquests of Zeus himself. Thetis may accept a mortal husband, but she doesn’t want to have mortal children. ‘Achilles is the seventh. Six times Thetis has taken a wet new infant up by the heels and dunked it, umbilicus trailing,’ in the caustic waters of the Styx ‘where she’d let it ...”

“... to look down on them. But from where I was standing to be so flagrant was luxury untold. They may have been outsiders, but to my mind they embodied the proud spirit of the ballroom more than anybody else. Nobody could touch them. They could be sure they would go on for ever because they already had. Back to the beginning, they trailed their ...”

“... wrote, ‘but starts rather from an inner fact of his individual consciousness.’ These two views may not be contradictory for most poets, but they are problematic in the case of MacDiarmid because he had been built from the outside in. In 1939, MacDiarmid wrote to an aspiring writer who had sent him some poems: so far from producing poetry you seem to me to ...”

“... quite legitimately, fill in the details of the ideal schema in different ways.’ Leach may not have been able to decide between structuralism and functionalism, but he was unyielding in his opposition to the school of anthropology associated with Durkheim’s disciple A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. According to this school, traditional societies were ...”

“... cast is assembled and the detective delivers a tidy summary, are rare. In Italian whodunnits one may discover who did it, but – a reflection of Italian reality – the criminal is rarely collared; the writer gives you the satisfaction of solving the crime, but withholds the pleasure of letting you see justice done. Carlotto echoes the pessimism of many ...”