“... short, a cult.‘Learned diversions, paranoid transitions, hip coincidences and conspiracies’, I read in the TP entry in my useful Cultural Icons encyclopedia. ‘The reclusive Pynchon writes as if everything is connected to everything else, and detours so obsessively en route that even the revelation that there is actually no revelation seems ...”

“... speculative capitalism that gave rise to the semi-Brutalist office and housing projects of Richard Seifert, such as the Anderston Centre in Glasgow, a half-finished and shoddily renovated sub-Barbican of monumental towers connected by walkways across a raised podium. Seifert, as Hugh Casson pointed out, had ‘loyalty to his clients’ where other ...”

“... week. 15 April. I have given all my literary archive to the Bodleian Library and this afternoon Richard Ovenden, the keeper of special collections, comes round to load up the hundred or so box files and take them to Oxford. There will be more in due course, including all my notebooks and the annotated copies of the printed stuff, but I’m very happy to see ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”

“... years old). ‘Dear Mr Gable,’ Garland sings,I am writing this to youAnd I hope that you will read it so you knowMy heart beats like a hammerAnd I stutter and I stammerEvery time I see you at the picture show.I guess I’m just another fan of yoursAnd I thought I’d write and tell you so.She then starts to sing the familiar words:You made me love you.I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a more temperate climate – a view shared by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Gibbon read meteorological reports from the colonies and drew a parallel between 18th-century Canada and ancient Germany, where, before the bogs were drained, forests cleared and the soil exposed to the warming effects of the sun, the climate had been equally ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”