“... 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 ...”

“... a sort of indignation disorder.) New in this text is the priority given to man as artist; Adam may have fallen, but actually he ‘sought the creative life’. For Newman ‘the aesthetic act always precedes the social one’; ‘man’s first expression’ was ‘a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication’. Once more an American version 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 ...”

“... maintained in Minima Moralia, are inevitably at once refused and demanded by them. That they may simply be incongruous he disregarded. Cases where parallels are as close as those between Proust and Powell lend ‘the compulsion to evaluate’ he thought so generally inescapable a particular force, requiring especial care. We are dealing with two great ...”

“... five exemplars, and pictures their lives and their probable futures with dry wit and what readers may have felt was an unusually fine grasp of detail. His types hover somewhere between reportage and fiction, each showing a different reaction when offered a bath by their client in his ‘nicely furnished bachelor apartment’. Len ‘ungraciously accepts, on ...”

“... an extent that plagiarism becomes innovation, and reading itself a form of literary experiment. It may also not have been lost on Borges, and it is not lost on the reader, that ‘The Congress’ is not only a version of El Caudillo, but also a parody of Borges’s earlier work, playing with all his old tricks, using a deadpan narrative, full of recondite ...”

“... Stockport and Rochdale – made the housing crisis central to his re-election campaign in May, when he won a third term by an overwhelming margin. He donates 15 per cent of his salary towards the effort to end rough sleeping. He says he’ll bear down on exploitative landlords who squeeze high rents out of tenants living in damp, chilly, crowded ...”

“... owners, so those who find themselves in a house with a formal dining room and drawing room may well feel some pressure to use them in the way their architect intended. One of the many merits of Hamling and Richardson’s book is that it makes its readers wonder whether they are in control of their own domestic environment or prisoners of ...”

“... writers, who feel starved for source material in an era of record-low crime rates.) In early May, Law & Order: Criminal Intent ran an episode about a pretty aspiring actress whose boyfriend claims she was shot during a Lower East Side mugging. But for network television, the slaying of a blonde by poor black kids was either too obvious or too crude. In ...”

“... La Princesse de Clèves, a 17th-century novel of love and duty set in the court of Henri II. This may not sound like a sure-fire way to wrest a climbdown from a government still contending with a general strike in one of its overseas possessions, the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and with the fallout from a day of action that had seen up to three million ...”

“... there when it was just a military prison. For penologists, the most intriguing part of Alcatraz may be the material that shows how many prisoners made another life after release. Was there something in the hours of solitary reflection and reading that enlarged their lives? Another legend was that Alcatraz was escape-proof. The structure of the prison was ...”

“... ten of wax or smoke. If book historians have gravitated towards tear-jerkers and pornography, it may be because both produce a somatic response. Scholars from various disciplines share the urge to match a mental process with material measurements: in 1988, Victor Nell’s Lost in a Book measured readers’ responses by means of salivation ...”

“... The Birth of a Nation may not be the greatest movie ever made (whatever that might mean), but it is the one that has had the greatest impact on America and, indirectly, the world. Never was a movie more aptly named; and rarely have quotations marks been more superfluous than in the subtitle of Melvyn Stokes’s informative book ...”

“... not that Vidal-Naquet is uninterested in exploring why the ‘malady’ took such a hold. It may have to do with politics and imperialism: a Spanish Atlantis provides Spain with a right to rule Atlantic territories. With nationalism: a Swedish Atlantis provides the Scandinavians with a glorious submerged antiquity. Or with anti-semitism: Atlantis ...”

“... three women gives animation to a few pages of Challenge, but though Orlando and Broderie anglaise may be enriched by their autobiographical subtext they don’t depend on it for their continuing lives. Both books, one a brilliant and original fantasy, the other a sophisticated and percipient comedy, gain a new layer of interest from the ...”