“... writers so rarely use the phrase ‘my husband’. Then it started to happen again and again. Stephen Amidon, we are told in the Contributors’ Notes, ‘lives in London with his wife and daughter Clementine’. Mr Amidon’s daughter has a name, apparently, but ‘his wife’ does not. Amidon’s story, ‘Echolocation’, turns out to be about a man ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The master-pieces of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama were triumphs over small-minded bigotry, and they must now, in Empson’s view, be saved from the prim, puritanical dons who ‘think that everybody in the period reverenced Degree’. Those dons have a ‘distaste for the normal affections’ and tirelessly try to pervert the ...”

“... for any Soviet person who wanted to make life liveable. The Bolshevik leadership, along with its small army of technicians, scientists, scholars, writers and artists, was attempting to establish a new space-time continuum for a country of 150 million people. While it had some success in creating a modern urban culture for an aspirational new generation, it ...”

“... look, for instance, at the fact that, once they have paid a fee – the amount varies: £35 for a small money claim, rising to £1670 for a very large one, and £465 for a non-money claim – to set their case down for trial, major litigants get a court and a judge free of charge for as long as their litigation lasts. One may ask why a cost-conscious state is ...”