“... its certainties irretrievable. The writer is trapped inside a dialectical cage. That’s why we read him.Fanon’s prose defies translation: even his titles are obscure. Les Damnés de la terre doesn’t mean The Wretched of the Earth. Not really. Not unless you know what ‘la terre’ signifies to the French (too much, alas) and where the whole phrase ...”

“... that was the secret of its ‘genius’. Philosophers were crazy for it too. Wittgenstein, who had read it ‘an extraordinary number of times’, went around quoting bits to friends. Heidegger kept a portrait of Dostoevsky on his desk; Nietzsche called him ‘the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn’. What most novelists would pay for blurbs ...”

“... them: ‘I think that I am a shy, jellylivered woman with no shred of confidence. But when people read the patterns of my life, they usually do not agree.’ It is the survivor, after all, who lives to tell the tale.Emecheta was born in Lagos in July 1944, the wettest month at latitudes just north of the equator. Her father was a railway worker who had fought ...”

“... Library branches were stuffed with new fiction and old treasures, which anyone could borrow or read. Anyone over eighteen could explore the marble labyrinths of what is now called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building: a palace of the people on 42nd Street, traditionally known as the Main or Central Branch, with its encyclopedic holdings. In the reading ...”

“... in Gaza, climate change. The Democrats, according to the polls, had lost their appeal to men. We read about the voter gender gap. We read that the disparity was greatest between divorced women (who lean heavily Democratic) and divorced men (who tend to vote Republican). We read that ...”

“... own house and a son at boarding school. I don’t know why I expected anything of her, I hadn’t read The Golden Notebook, or any of the other books about women who actually lived lives. I sensed her confidence and sophistication. She exuded calm as we sipped the soup, though it turned out she felt nothing of the sort, as why should she, opening the door to ...”

“... 1832-1852), in fluency and subtlety the equal at least of those other celebrated Ford Lectures, Richard Pares’s King George III and the Politicians. Professor Gash has yet to be honoured by a festschrift. But Edward Arnold have done him proud and served readers better by inviting him to publish this collection of pieces old and new, 15 essays and articles ...”

“... sample, but this is a fine collection: many budding gardeners will find it a satisfying bedside read, full of other people’s ideas about what to do with awkward plots, dark basements, and corners of grey old gardens. From my last visit to the botanical gardens at Kew a sad memory persists of the huge iron ribs of the Palm House glassless and empty, like ...”

“... and Videotape’ at Spago and Chez Panisse. Near the great UCLA library, the licence on a Porsche read ‘IB PHD’. Back east at chilly Gettysburg College near the Civil War battlefield in rural Pennsylvania, all the talk was about ‘the Greeks’ – fraternities and sororities – whose parties, policies and rushing practices obsessively dominated student ...”

“... accounts of them the memories and lore of the islanders themselves. Strangely, as in Synge, we read the stories about the seandream (the old people), and hear of the retentiveness of the communal memory, in the awareness that this is a vanishing resource, fading before the requirements of modern tourism and economic change. Every memorialist of Ireland’s ...”

“... characteristically, seemed immersed in Shakespeare. With some of his staff around him on deck, he read from Macbeth the lines: Duncan is in his grave. After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well. A few days later the implicit prophecy had come true. McPherson presents Lincoln through his actions rather than through his reflections; this book does not often ...”

“... and his liking for ‘the study of morbid cases of the soul’ – is among the worst-edited (by Richard Curle, 1937); moreover, the original manuscripts are lost and one can only hope that Kelley and Hudson find them before their edition reaches the 1860s. The edition of the love letters by Elvan Kintner (1969) is impressive but by no means definitive: it ...”

“... have injected an element of the energy which makes attractive fictional monsters as disparate as Richard III and John Self. Chicago Loop (terrific title) is another book that has a cold, clear surface and a lurking nastiness underneath. Its central character, Parker Jagoda (terrific name), is a 37-year old architect-turned-developer who, unknown to his ...”

“... so we do not know to what precisely Hazlitt refers – perhaps a passage in the lecture on Richard II, in which Coleridge claims that ‘the Spirit of patriotic reminiscence is the all-permeating Spirit of this Drama’ and that the play is likely to ‘fall dead on the hearts of Jacobinised Englishmen’. Back in the 1790s, Coleridge and Thelwall had ...”

“... and says that he could write the same words with a very different meaning: The stanza can be read as all about science, all about standing in the moving spotlight, about taming space and time, about the very large built from the quantum graininess of the very small, a lone flower as a miniature of evolution … The mystic is content to bask in the wonder ...”