“... parents return to Germany) and of assorted part-time jobs in his teens. His mother appears small and shrewish, Gertrude to a Morel not a Claudius, in awe of her husband’s animal cunning; the son takes her side and does the necessary (‘It’s up to me to be the man of the house’), but she is allowed only two poems to voice her own complaints. It ...”

“... misconceived and often grotesque in execution. The tributary volume of memoirs, such as the one Stephen Spender compiled after Auden’s death, has the value not only of illuminating its subject but of providing a complex shading of reaction and relation through the personalities of the contributors. Alan Blyth has recorded reminiscences from 30 persons who ...”

“... or your mouth.’   ‘So I’m entering a den of thieves, but all their secrets, great and small, are entrusted to my honour.’ The Leuwens earn the reader’s affection by their clear-sightedness, their lack of hypocrisy, their contempt for the crooks and fools around them; they are intelligent, well-meaning, generous, and they take every ...”

“... back a lot of my own feelings as I’ve hiked around the western states in the 1990s ... The small towns ... are shells, reduced to a gas station and food mart (“Video Rentals” in neon in the window), a Church of God, and a ravaged motel for migrant, undocumented farm workers ... I wonder, what would I belong to here? Not the Church of God. Maybe the ...”

“... entrails of the boughs whereon they sat, and undiscernibly conveyed under their bellies into their small throats sloping, they whistled and freely carolled their natural field note. ‘Freely carolled their natural field note’ is the kind of joke inherent in the Wunderkammer aesthetic, for there is, as Nashe is at pains to insist, nothing either spontaneous ...”

“... join forces, for reasons that may never become clear. Cem headed out into the wilderness with a small new fringe party; Dervis joined the CHP (Republican People’s Party), a social democrat grouping descended from the party of Atatürk, one of the last remnants of Turkey’s secular probity. I briefly encountered – or heckled – Dervis while he was ...”

“... portrait, the truth of the image is independent of the smudging or misrepresentation of small details, which the mind, like the eye, corrects instinctively; such surface features are no hindrance to the perception of deeper and perhaps richer truths. Of all books on Shostakovich, this is the one that best depicts the horrors and triumphs of his life ...”

“... Stephen Hawking is now 50 years old, and has lived 25 years longer than he once expected to live. As a scientist he long ago earned the respect of his colleagues; more recently, with the astonishing success of his book A Brief History of Time, he has become a widely recognised public figure. Immobile for decades, he is now unable to communicate except by means of an electronic voice-synthesiser connected to a word-processor ...”

“... In general, the closer he is to epigram the funnier and neater. But Enright is always likeable. Stephen Romer’s self-presentation is not. Certainly, one comes away from Plato’s Ladder with a powerful sense of the Platonic Form of The Poet. The Poet dedicates poems to friends, has other artist friends, like a painter called Caroline (‘You are my ...”

“... and it is striking how little we suddenly find we care about any of them. The novel has done its small work, come to a close, and leaves us with just a certain admiration for the author’s concise manner and manipulative skills. Rudolf Nassauer’s Kramer’s Goats promises a more substantial reward for the reader, as, given its themes of the Nazi aftermath ...”

“... a menu of ‘Primary Colors Specials’, including Lasagne di Paul Begalanese and Pork Chop George Stephen-applesauce. There’s a copy prominently displayed in the new books section of the White House library, and 742,000 have been shipped to bookstores to meet the demand. It’s number one on the New York Times bestseller list; North American paperback ...”

“... Stephen L. Carter has written the kind of novel in which the bad guys say ‘very well’ when they mean ‘OK’; in which the hero calls a visit from old friends ‘a delightfully rambunctious affair’ and his rocky marriage a ‘tumultuous mutuality’; in which ‘homes’ are ‘spacious’, jealousy ‘flames afresh’ and eminent legal scholars spend dinner parties debating the existence of God ...”

“... more than life-size; they take you by the scruff and hold your eye. Accompanying The Burghers is a small bronze of the final version of Balzac as well as the striding nude study for it in plaster (shown here). Elsewhere there is a plaster of The Kiss at the original size, as well as the enlarged marble version from the Tate. The Thinker is there, ...”

“... Stephen Braude is a philosopher who thinks that the phenomenon of multiple personality teaches something about the human mind. Until recently he would not have had much of a phenomenon: a thin diet of 19th-century anecdotes, a little flurry of cases in France after 1875, and a few more described at greater length in America after the turn of the century ...”

“... want of occupation’. Although he lived beyond his means, his was the relatively small-scale, soberly-incurred, financial anxiety of the overstretched professional man, not the profligacy of the aristocrat. Educating his children, paying their medical bills, keeping up appearances – these were the sources of sleeplessness. When his ...”