“... grace, called yourself one of art’s elect, then she would let you in on certain secrets: whom to read, how to gaze, what else there was to learn. Those who couldn’t feel it, those who lost the game, or didn’t see much worth winning, called her a phony and a fraud. Her failings are on display in these diaries. She had trouble feeling, sometimes, and being ...”

“... economically inflected subjects, and found that almost the only non-worky thing I could bear to read was Agatha Christie. She is the only writer by whom I’ve read more than fifty books. So – why? The case against Christie was well put by one of the first grown-up critics to write about detective fiction, Edmund ...”

“... Hanns Eisler records a meeting between Brecht and Zweig in London. Brecht, who ‘of course never read a line of Zweig’ (one admires the economy of effort), sees him only as a possible source of funds for his theatre; Zweig, no doubt, is interested only in adding the notch of another great man to his metaphorical bedpost. Brecht asks Eisler for a ...”

“... sees his mother and father and brother again. The Germans shoot Mr and Mrs Steenwijk and their son Peter and burn down their house, because Fake Ploeg, chief inspector of the Haarlem police, has been found dead outside their front door. The Germans also shoot 29 Communists. It is the Communists who have assassinated Ploeg, and the body originally lay outside ...”

“... of spawn; some were mere skins, like discarded gloves. It was a grotesque sight. I’d never read Ring of Bright Water, just knew it was some sort of old-school nature writing about otters. There had been a film. I’d assumed the ‘ring of bright water’ was what you saw on the surface after an otter dived. That evening, I picked the book from the ...”

“... and Nabokov have also occupied his attention significantly. He seems to loathe Norman Mailer and Peter Carey.) There was a hiatus of 14 years between the stories in Emerald Blue (1995) and the publication of Barley Patch (2009), the first of four books Murnane classifies not as novels or stories but simply ‘fictions’. In these highly self-conscious works ...”

“... the perspective of an adult, and to assume that Gorey did too. Yet, as his occasional collaborator Peter Neumeyer remarked: ‘Of all the people I’ve known nobody has been less interested in children.’ He had no memory of Gorey ever even using the word ‘child’.What Gorey understood was not children, but the perspective of childhood and its lack of ...”

“... in Hetta’s hammock amidst laburnum and laurel. Here, too, on sunny days, William would sit and read, stripped to the waist: he loved the open air. Early on (they had bought the house in 1960), Hetta had made a shallow, kidney-shaped pond amongst the flags and species iris at the back of the lawn, and here, to William’s delight, toads came each year to ...”

“... Satires with some added shivers of late Henrician courtly horror. Did Wyatt’s mother’s maids read Horace? Were they reciting a folk tale they had received by oral transmission? Or (more probably) were the maids a fiction designed to mask a satire on what it was like to be a courtier in the later reign of Henry VIII – an experience which, for want of a ...”

“... Jeffery’s scholarship is beyond reproach. She is one of the few people who have actually read the five volumes of the TRC Report and is probably the only one who has tested it against the evidence uncovered by the various judicial inquiries, special investigations and court cases which had – in far greater detail – covered much of the same ground ...”

“... near enough to tell us what we need to know about Antonia or Jim or the professor, Godfrey St Peter, but not so near as to infringe on their privacy or essential dignity. She observes her characters respectfully, as if across the width of a farmhouse supper table, or from a distance equivalent to that between one furrow and the next in a neatly ploughed ...”

“... is common with cult journals, Die Fackel’s subscribers were as illustrious as its contributors: Peter Altenberg, Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Schoenberg, Strindberg, Trakl and Wedekind (whose play Spring Awakening Franzen translated in 1986 and published in 2007). Kafka was a loyal reader, as was Benjamin, who regarded Die Fackel as the literary ...”

“... said, we have lived/In important places’ (‘The Ministry of Fear’). It is a sobering thing to read O’Driscoll’s ten-page chronology of Heaney’s life (up to 2008): the meetings with famous men, the travel, the lectures and prizes and distinctions, things that are off the map, or off the charts. (Friendship with the empress of Japan? To Delphi to ...”

“... and sinks into a mire of bloated, yearning commonplaces. Marc Shell, however, has been able to read the braille of another tale beneath the rhetorical surplus, and to discover there the brightness of an individual imagination communicating strongly within given restrictions. His guidance is indispensable. Even Lacan was alert to the female ...”

“... whereas the $3000 million human genome project could one day allow the history of evolution to be read like a book. On the scale of moral worth, the $8000 million superconducting supercollider lies nearer to the human genome project, but that may not save it. The atom-smasher is designed to create energy conditions not seen in the universe since a trillionth ...”