“... for his first and last chapters, and the theme of the private realm as something easily forfeited may engage him more profoundly than his thriller plot, for all the casual mastery of his handling. The meeting of Calvin’s Neighbourhood Watch, long delayed, beautifully led up to, is a classic of grotesque comedy. Only one little incident, early on in the ...”

“... and very polite to each other; and are very polite again as soon as the quarrel is over. We may want to remember though what Proust says about nice people in a notebook: ‘In my novel, there is an ultra-bourgeois family, how many sick people in it?’ – ‘combien de malades dedans?’ What seems to have happened is that at the end of the episode of ...”

“... this work, but he did it, just as he played his part in bringing Wolsey down. The chief agents may have been the men whom the French called ‘le duc de Nortfoch et sa bande’, but Suffolk marched in with Thomas Howard to confiscate the Great Seal, and declared: ‘there never was legate nor cardinall, that did good in England.’ In the resulting power ...”

“... how all these crises are interconnected, and how the solutions could be too. In short, Said may have had no time for tree-huggers, but tree-huggers must urgently make time for Said – and for a great many other anti-imperialist, postcolonial thinkers – because without that knowledge, there is no way to understand how we ended up in this dangerous ...”

“... which he was later berated in the 1970s,’ but surely, at a fundamental level, there is. Williams may recognise, unlike more conservative critics, that the village of the 19th and early 20th centuries was not an ‘organic community’ which had been disrupted by the social and economic changes of the past couple of decades, but there remains the structural ...”

“... of the Maharishi kicking in, and then out, it would all have taken on another dimension still. You may not have remained at one with the universe, but somehow the erstwhile notion that you became it by being part of it, then all of it, and that it became you in microcosm, would have left you feeling that immense forces were in play when you tried to figure out ...”

“... The mode is extremely challenging, and several pitfalls opened even beneath Faulkner: the novelist may rely excessively on cognitive eccentricity, especially mental illness, to differentiate his narrators (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying), or else may invest the narrators more or less equally, and therefore ...”

“... enemies in France and Latin America. Yet Debray has a courageous, martial temperament, despising May 68 for its ‘absence of human sacrifice’ and regretting the rise of brittle ‘humanist values’, with their basis in ‘predominantly feminine “life-affirming” mentalities’. Non-Westerners, he feels, know better; they are closer to ‘the ...”

“... that I had been hallucinating for several days, and I still recall images and fragments from what may well have been a meaningful though decidedly bizarre narrative, a story I was telling myself in a last-ditch attempt to create order in a life that had, by that point, become hopelessly chaotic. What others knew about these hallucinations I never fully ...”

“... Modiano, The Black Notebook (2012), in which an old man dimly recalls an affair with a woman who may have been a conspirator in the 1965 kidnapping and murder in Paris of the left-wing Moroccan leader Mehdi Ben Barka. Modiano has increasingly returned in his work to the early 1960s, a ‘bizarre and chaotic period’. But the long moment that underlies all ...”

“... life. (As my parents had recently returned from a 22-year migration to Lancashire, the difference may have seemed sharper to them.)The Highland Clearances stood apart from the everyday experience of having relatives in Manchester, Queensland or Vancouver: the evictions and cottage-burnings of the previous century were a long way from the easy matter of ...”

“... has given the world three gifts: chemicals, debt and Joe Biden. Each promises great things but may deliver undesirable side effects. Until the 19th century Delaware’s primary crop was tobacco. Then a French Huguenot called Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, son of an adviser to Louis XVI, began manufacturing gunpowder on the Brandywine River, north of ...”

“... 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 aunt’, not to mention ‘a Chinee’. In her introduction to Eprile’s rendition, Thurman ...”

“... express the inexpressibleness of his matter’ (this was Agee’s own view). Trilling (and Agee) may have been right. But perhaps the opening pages, though touted as experimental, are actually closer to an extrapolation of Catholic ritual – the self-examination and confession of sin before Holy Communion (Agee was a Catholic). For he knows that he must ...”

“... implementing the conflict at the core of modernity. This argument, strained and abstract as it may seem, has nevertheless inspired innumerable readers struggling to find a place for themselves in the maelstrom of the modern city. Berman’s admiration, however reluctant, was a portent. In 2007, the Queens Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York ...”