“... in chemistry was nourished by ‘a Home Chemistry set’ in a pink cardboard box that contained little pillboxes of sulphur, iron filings, charcoal etc, and doubtless also – my own memory stirs – of lycopodium powder, a plant spore with pyrotechnic possibilities. It so happened that one of the best-known firms of laboratory furnishers was just by an ...”

“... misprision of the master’s most famous chord progression. At a stroke (or should one say, with a little gentle stroking), the prelude blasphemed against the necessity and the high seriousness of the German musical tradition. It showed that there could be other ways of doing things: different scales, different arrangements of common chords, perfectly ...”

“... The earliest poem collected in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, Alice Quinn’s edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s miscellaneous drafts and fragments, opens: I introduce Penelope Gwin, A friend of mine through thick and thin, Who’s travelled much in foreign parts Pursuing culture and the arts. ‘And also,’ says Penelope ‘This family life is not for me ...”

“... of the Red Death’ (the dead black youth, for instance, lives in the improbably-named Edgar Allan Poe Towers public-housing project). The other image is that of Savonarola purging the luxury of Florence with his burning of the vanities. Wolfe’s novel has been hailed (notably by the Conservative columnist George Will) as the work of a contemporary ...”

“... to Roger Shattuck . . . with their romps up and down the glooming critical slopes of the Blooms, Allan and Harold’ – this is a fair sample, unfortunately, of his idea of lively prose. He accepts that post-structuralism, new historicism, queer studies and all the other movements he bundles together as Theory have done some good. They have made us more ...”

“... which specialised in swindlers but later branched out into adultery. This was twenty years before Allan Pinkerton, ‘the Vidocq of the West’, founded his National Detective Agency in Chicago. Vidocq’s Bureau des Renseignements boasted a vast database of file-cards on every known criminal and a team that sounds like a Victorian equivalent of the ...”

“... to him had she brought out her second collection. In 1973, 14 years after the publication of The Little Disturbances of Man, he came over to say that she must by now have enough stories lying around the house to make another book; she demurred, then dug through her files, then went back to look again when he assured her she had missed out a couple. Enormous ...”

“... You can see why a writer might want to tame them. In Cortázar’s ‘Casa Tomada’, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, the house and its occupiers are at war, and the drama lies in the question of who will come out on top. With Herrera, by contrast, there is never any doubt.In distrusting character, or finding it passé, the ...”

“... On 18 August the Lord High Admiral, Howard of Effingham, wrote from his flagship, ‘Some made little account of Spanish force by sea, but I do warrant you, all this world never saw such a force as theirs was’; and even later Sir Francis Drake in the Revenge was by no means sure that the danger had passed. Parma, with a powerful army, was still there in ...”

“... a good deal of his life among English-speaking people. He is one of those German authors who are a little in love with the English, more particularly a certain kind of young Englishman of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely ...”

“... is that we don’t fully recognise a phone booth as a phone booth until we’ve felt just a little bit sick at the sight and smell of it. The disgust is the recognition. But what exactly is being recognised? Of course, better things do happen in phone booths, at least in fiction. Clark Kent and Dr Who regularly disappear into booths maintained to high ...”

“... Queen Street across the dark belt of gardens; where also, we told each other, there might be sick little boys and their nurses waiting, like us, for the morning.’In Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell about It, Alice Vernon argues the case for an entanglement between the nightmares we are bound to have and the stories we wish to ...”

“... thought of murder as misreading. The signs may be either outlandish or mundane. I come now to a little touch of Shakespeare in the later literature of the supernatural. When the Governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw sees her first ghost, that of the wicked valet Peter Quint, the words she uses to describe the event – which initially persuades ...”

“... First Family contains its own underappreciated RINO: George H.W. Bush. Conviction politics played little part in the career of the senior Bush, who had a reputation for being ‘somewhat to the centre of centre’. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see him as a man without principles. An upright Yankee, his career in Texas notwithstanding, he inherited ...”

“... beat the human Go master.* Sometimes I get angry at my car’s satnav device: she seems to me a little too prissy and self-satisfied, and thinks she knows best how to get around my own town. (I don’t think of her as stupid, just as having an agenda of her own.) These things have a deep history, and Jessica Riskin’s wide-ranging, witty and astonishingly ...”