“... knew more about where the musicians came from, or who they were before the band existed. Solipsism may be a theme that plays against Lethem’s considerable strengths. In Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, the personal had a social and artistic context. The backdrop of You Don’t Love Me Yet is flimsy by comparison; the wider world is ...”

“... standards for judging the noise, the fear, the savagery. ‘Here,’ he wrote from Verdun in May 1916, ‘it is extermination on the ground.’ He told her about the never-ending artillery duel, the comrade who was cut in two by shrapnel, the gas attacks, the dismembered, stinking corpses of horses – everything that newsreels, photographs, newspapers ...”

“... the Sadean woman a lad who, in spite of his prodigious ‘recovery rate’ and sperm flow (they may not be so good at conversation, she says on the TV programme, but who needs conversation? Well, I do, for one; can I be alone?), is essentially desirable for his passivity: ‘Boyhood is the blessed time when he still remembers how to give and take pleasure ...”

“... Timur der Eroberer und die islamische Welt des späten Mittelalters (1993). Those who read French may also consult Jean Aubin’s brilliant and wide-ranging essay ‘Comment Tamerlan prenait les villes’ (published in Studia Islamica in 1963); Aubin was especially interested in Tamerlane’s residual shamanism and his reputation for sorcery. Despotism and ...”

“... nature and the waves proclaimed that it must also be a single, identifiable unit. James I, who may have hankered after the title of ‘Emperor of Great Britain’, made a point after 1603 of pushing mare clausum policies in all the seas around the coasts of England, Wales and Scotland. By the mid-17th century, these ideas and initiatives were shifting ...”

“... its objective.’ This decision, if hardly to the War Council’s credit, is less bizarre than it may seem. The Council had been considering the bleak strategic options confronting it in other theatres, and was not told that Churchill’s naval advisers were ambivalent about the scheme. Dismayed by the heavy casualties that further action on the Western Front ...”

“... scarcely last beyond today’. ‘Like clock hands in a bar mirror’. ‘I think it may come out right this winter.’) Sound in Mahon’s poetry has a Beckettian affinity with silence. With human vitality draining into those objects on which it acts, or which act on it, the outside world, as in low-budget drama, is suggested by a few momentous ...”

“... chronicle of scandalous goings-on among the Victorian middle classes claims that East Lynne may be ‘one of the most famous unread works in the English language’. Very possibly. Yet it was spectacularly successful in its day, and its popularity has turned out to be more durable than that of most publishing sensations. Newly literate novel-readers in ...”

“... the water. Brennan, as skipper, clears his throat, puts on his professional voice. ‘As you may have realised, this is a first,’ but now he’s laughing again. ‘Thirteen years – we’ve never seen white-sided dolphins. I mean, they exist but usually way out west in the Atlantic. Not around here.’ Someone says: ‘All we need now is killer ...”

“... the orientals of today trying to imitate us, and despising their ancestors’ customs. But they may be right. After all, it is their affair to choose how they want to live. In any case I’ll admit that your country is just as ripe for independence as, shall we say, the Republics of Central America. I think our Government will soon recognise your ...”

“... gulps, half-drowns, sputters and gasps; then she squawks a bit, and starts all over again. This may be an iconised activity made sacred by some and disgusting by others, but it is first and foremost a meal. It is only occasionally serene. It also takes a long time. I do smile at her and coo a bit, but I also read a lot (she will hate books), talk, or type ...”

“... Hawaryat, according to the Ethiopian royal chronicle, had died a decade or so earlier, on 22 May 1760. Bredin’s overall account seems strongly influenced by Graham Hancock’s The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant (1992). Hancock was the first to argue that, as a Freemason (and hence an heir of the Templars), Bruce did not ...”

“... texts. The Crusades are one obvious case, and a provisional territorial impulse, at least, may be discerned in the Latin Crusader kingdoms and fiefdoms established in the Holy Land. However, the Latin kingdoms lacked the material and cultural conditions that might have prolonged territorial control. Before the 18th and 19th centuries, the West’s ...”

“... by his subject. The awkwardness of ‘Letter to Walt Whitman’, the worst poem in Source, may have a similar origin. It also strikes a note of cloying familiarity: ‘I get ahead of myself, Walt’; ‘Then one thing made you seem alive:/your parrot, Walt’; ‘I could smell it, Walt.’ Doty is reduced to awkward inversion and linguistic ...”

“... despised rationality – which no scientist can do, however irrational his attitudes and behaviour may be.) Worse still: Tsypkin was a Jew; Dostoevsky was a violent and unregenerate anti-semite. So, by and large, was Anna. In Summer in Baden-Baden one obsessive, Tsypkin, writes about his obsession with Dostoevsky, while also re-creating imaginatively the ...”