“... central traditions of British political life, by contrast, such as the state-encrusted flummery of Black Rod, the Mace and the Queen’s Speech, are quite dead: the rows about the handling of the sacred Mace are really to do with the blasphemous disturbance of a corpse.Eugen Weber amends Marx to say that when revolution repeats itself, it becomes not tragedy ...”

“... Sante calls this ‘an aggressive silence, as charged, dense and reverberating as Malevich’s black canvas. It affirms that all writing is compromise, that conception will always trump execution, that ego and politics are everyone’s co-authors. It may be rooted in despair but it grows in the direction of transcendence. It wishes to free poetry from ...”

“... reader’s. He was prepared to indulge in a kind of crazed fusion of the two in his commentary on Eugene Onegin, and to parody that madness in Pale Fire. When in his afterword to Lolita he defined his ideal of ‘aesthetic bliss’ in literature he was speaking as a reader and a writer – to be precise as ‘neither a reader nor a writer of didactic ...”

“... Rossellini. Between shifts showing soldiers round the museums, they would work on movie scripts at black-market trattorias. By some accounts, Hayes collaborated on the screenplay of Bicycle Thieves and he certainly wrote one section of the screenplay for Rossellini’s Paisá (1946), a neorealist film about the Italian campaign told in six vignettes, which ...”

“... noble marble monument’ bearing a record of his deeds. His cousin, Jacopo Pesaro, who chose black rather than scarlet and became bishop of Paphos, commanded the Papal fleet in the same campaign as Benedetto, and commissioned two paintings from Titian to commemorate the victory, for which he felt he had never been given the credit which was his due. Thus ...”

“... wonderful ‘imitations’ of Rimbaud, Rilke and others. But then Nabokov’s literal version of Eugene Onegin has all kinds of virtues, and is itself routinely pilloried by almost everyone who offers an opinion on it. At first glance, Paterson, a Scottish jazz-folk musician born in Dundee in 1963, doesn’t seem to have too much in common with Machado, a ...”

“... a slower wavelength he named delta which characterised deep sleep. Kleitman and his new assistant, Eugene Aserinsky, used the EEG to investigate narcolepsy and to study the phenomenon of rapid eye movement in certain phases of sleep. The wandering of eyes under their lids had typically been seen as a sign that a fitful sleeper was on the point of waking, but ...”

“... the race in the middle of primary season; after a strong challenge from the anti-Vietnam candidate Eugene McCarthy and facing dissent in his party, he became convinced he wasn’t going to win. Then Robert F. Kennedy, one of three main Democratic contenders (alongside McCarthy and the vice president, Hubert Humphrey), was assassinated, only two months after ...”

“... retailed with rapt pedantry – is inconceivable without Joyce’s example: ‘A young woman in a black dress, with a shiny forehead and quick, wandering eyes, sat down at his feet for the eighth time, sideways on a stool, numbly extracted a narrow shoe from the rustling interior of its box, spread her elbows apart as she slackened the edges, glanced ...”

“... critic.’ A few years later Styron wrote about his bout with what Churchill called ‘the black dog’ in a memoir, originally published in Vanity Fair, called Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990). It was an instant bestseller with staying power. ‘Curious to think that a slender little volume about lunacy may provide a meal ticket for my ...”

“... of breath’. But for me – I take my cue from a scholar who discusses this material, Eugene Wang – the figures whose presence on the banner goes on attracting my attention are a handful of dead individuals setting out on the journey, along the very first yards of the dragon-tail way. ‘Dishevelled’, Wang calls them. Possessed of an unkempt ...”

“... of the stories in Small Circle of Beings (1988). (Coetzee’s first novel begins: ‘My name is Eugene Dawn. I cannot help that.’) But while his reports on the post-apartheid state of the nation are clearly in dialogue with such novels as Disgrace, they project a more expansive world of Galgut’s own, using charged male friendships as well as sex with ...”

“... discovers ‘a packet of mail’ where I see a wrapped brie or camembert with the maker’s name, Eugene Martin, prominently displayed. It may be a parcel, of course. Without looking at the original, it is impossible to be certain, though even in reproduction the label looks printed rather than hand-printed like an address. At any rate, a parcel wouldn’t ...”

“... of the celebrated Agrarian manifesto, I’ll take my stand (1930), and even told Ralph Ellison and Eugene Walter in 1957 that this unreadiness had been an ‘objective’ fact in 1929. The posture does Warren an injustice. The early statement is less crudely inhumane than it is made to seem, and the subsequent record is honourable. But the mental set ...”

“... argument. First, we have Booth’s colour-coded map of London (gold for wealthy districts, black for poor), in which the social classes are often separated only by the width of a street or a block. Alongside Booth, we have Moretti’s cartography of the fictional city, as represented, for instance, by that quintessentially 19th-century genre, the ...”