“... Basic Knowledge, which ordinary people are expected to possess, people for whom school was no more than a bad dream. Here they can reassure themselves that they have the information they need in order to carry on ordinary conversations. This is a Manual of Contemporary Folklore. There is no entry on Culture, but there is one on the Cultural ...”

“... revolution.’ For any action to take place, the novel needs another force, which emerges as the more determined and unconflicted figure of Paul Muniment, who is all outwardness, decisiveness and manliness, with politics that are focused, thought-out, physical, set against Robinson’s ambiguous sexual and social presence. But drama in the novel can only ...”

“... desire and money as part of a course about 20th-century narrative I’d titled, quoting from Thomas Wolfe, ‘Life is strange and the world is bad’; nothing else but Pandora’s Box would do. Happily, they did not fidget or shuffle, but sat like mice. Finally Jack the Ripper stabbed Lulu just as, or just because, she turns towards him the full force of ...”

“... The title-sequence of Seamus Heaney’s sixth collection finds him on Station Island, Lough Derg, more commonly known as St Patrick’s Purgatory. It’s the setting for a pilgrimage undertaken by thousands of Irish men and women each year. For three days they fast and pray, deprive themselves of sleep, and walk barefoot round the station ‘beds’ – circles of rough stones said to be the remains of monastic huts ...”

“... of comets in space and he was chosen to lead the Académie committee on comets’ orbits. More than most other Frenchmen Laplace helped define the ways in which precisely calculable laws seemingly govern both nature and society. He was interior minister under the Consulate, senator, head of the Parisian scientific community, and survived the Bourbon ...”

“... newly-formed Australia Council. Behind established international figures such as Patrick White, Thomas Keneally and now Peter Carey crowds a small army – a second wave, as it were – of grant-garlanded and prize-bedecked novelists and storytellers, many of whom, especially those whose reputations derive initially from short fiction, have benefited from ...”

“... independence from Europe, but its very scope, speed and lightness of touch leave one hankering for more information and perhaps a little less hankering on the part of Balthasar. Fuentes shares with Homero Aridjis a concern with the ability of individuals and people to assert their own identity and ‘destiny’. For Fuentes it has long been a question of ...”

“... pertinent prints. Many galleries have only one Cranach, and you can see why they might not want more. Much is repetitive. All five pictures in the exhibition have the sky that fades from vibrant blue to pale yellow; three have a rocky hill, distant buildings and a reflecting lake; all include dark evergreen foliage against which naked figures stand out. And ...”

“... with such clarity in their laboratories and papers?If we accept this periodisation, it is now more than half a century since the heyday of political modernism and the sociological project that accompanied it. Are we still, today, postmodern? Are we really still grappling with the fallout of 1968? It can certainly seem so when we are confronted with the ...”

“... come down like an iron cage), the freedom of discovery – sexuality, culture, ideas – and in a more subtle sense, perhaps, the freedom from nationality, from the guilt of class and of being an American. What the ‘real’ writer wants to write about is not that kind of free-floating freedom, but rather the realities of constraint (the campus novel has the ...”

“... of the best pieces the paper has published on postwar politics in France. He has gone on to write more than a hundred pieces for the LRB, as an Oxford scholar whose politics were to the left of the editor’s (Karl Miller favoured the SDP, while Johnson favoured Labour). Nowadays I think he’d still say he was on the left but it isn’t obvious what that ...”

“... Swift (1752). ‘Being born amongst men and, of consequence, piqued by many and peevish at more, he has blasphemed a nature a little lower than that of angels and assumed by far higher than they,’ according to Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). In short, was Swift a monster, as Samuel Johnson nearly said: ‘The greatest ...”

“... spy on oneself – and the delusion of drinking is that it can take the edge off reality, make it more bearable. Instead, as her study shows, it becomes a reality of its own. ‘Inspiration contained a death threat,’ Saul Bellow said in his introduction to John Berryman’s novel Recovery. ‘He would, as he wrote the things he had waited and prayed ...”

“... swinging scenes, did some major acid, talked about the world. Shetzline had been a student with Thomas Pynchon at Cornell in the 1950s, and he gave me Pynchon’s address in Manhattan Beach. When I went down to visit my parents, I knocked on his door. I grew up on 32nd Street and Pynchon was living on 33rd. At first he was dismissive, even paranoid. ‘Are ...”