“... He was born in 1948, the year of the Palestinian catastrophe. He grew up in the predominantly Christian east of Beirut, in the prosperous hilltop neighbourhood of Ashrafiyyeh, also known as Little Mountain – Little Mountain is the title of his second novel, published in 1977, and his first book to be translated into English, in 1989. His grandfather ...”

“... important. Including all one’s foolish desires: a penis that would grow erect at will, a magic ring he could use to make women fall in love with him, good teeth, good skin, money in his pocket. But is romantic passion compatible with freedom? Beyle knew it wasn’t. To fall in love was to be ‘overwhelmed by some superior force’. Nor did it guarantee ...”

“... on), Les Misérables keeps its French title in English because the word has an attractive, exotic ring to the English ear. It is a question of marketing. Les Misérables sounds more romantic than The Wretched, a title that was initially placed alongside it in explanation. If anything, the use of the French title obscures the moral discrimination Hugo is ...”

“... if the objects of their admiration differed. Few of their comments are without some contemporary ring. Escaping from the pruderies of Weimar to Rome, Goethe found it ‘morally salutary to be living in the midst of a sensual people’. In Italy, Byron decided, ‘there is no law or government at all; and it is wonderful how well things go on without ...”

“... hands. On his pinky – you cannot see it, it lies under the covers – he wears a gold ring, not a wedding ring but a high-school ring, a singular trinket for a fabulously misanthropic miser. His youngest daughter gave it to him when she left school and asked him to wear ...”

“... have been heading for the van.’ I was relieved that on this occasion she didn’t demand that I ring the police, as she regularly did if anything out of the ordinary occurred. Perhaps this was too out of the ordinary (though it turned out the pet shop in Parkway had been broken into the previous night, so she may have seen a snake). She brought her mug over ...”

“... chapter-headings and an insistently chatty authorial persona. Only in the final pages, where the Christian analogy is insisted on rather too stridently, does this tone falter. ‘To keep the reader from raising his hopes too high with regard to the entertainment value of this little book,’ comments the heading to the first chapter, ‘it is here stated ...”

“... shtetl life. The novel he sets in Russia, The Fixer, in which a Jewish man is accused of killing a Christian child, is so fantastically miserable that many thought it unreadable, though it won the Pulitzer Prize. But the new world brought Malamud’s parents less joy than they had hoped. Bertha was schizophrenic, and would die in a mental institution when ...”

“... invasion of Lebanon in 1982 is clearly an awkward episode. The word ‘invasion’ has a violent ring. So Mr Rostow talks about the Israelis ‘entering’ Lebanon, and Mr Johnson has them ‘crossing into Lebanon’. In the same way, no doubt, did the Russians cross into Afghanistan and the Germans enter Poland. The little matter of the entry into Lebanon ...”

“... by theft and elopement and then by legal coercion to hand over a mass of wealth to Jessica and her Christian husband, Lorenzo. An Elizabethan audience would have responded with mixed feelings. On the one hand, Jessica takes and is then given by the Venetian court the sort of marriage portion and legacy she would expect. That she changes her faith would ...”

“... the period of his marriage (1846-61), together with some brilliant antecedents and parts of The Ring and the Book (1868-69). But since canonisation imposes itself on authors, not just on works, full editorial care is being extended to everything else as well, including tens of thousands of lines of unfocused, grinding verse from both the beginning and end ...”

“... like Kolakowski’s image of Communist Russia, and though such remarks have a hard-headed radical ring to them they do nothing to help us understand Chaucer or Langland or their age. In an earlier and much better book, Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory (1975), Aers has argued that the debate among medievalists over ...”

“... and the possible derivation of late accounts like Snorri’s from learned European sources, Christian, Neoplatonic and even Judaic. This, though, turns attention away from the consistently idiosyncratic nature of the myths, which is the first thing everyone notices about them. The reason for O’Donoghue’s caution becomes clear in the book’s final ...”

“... and 10:04 incorporate passages of literary and art criticism (on John Ashbery’s poems, or Christian Marclay’s film The Clock) into their narratives, some of it taken almost verbatim from Lerner’s own published essays. It’s a remarkable thing to create a narrator who can credibly launch into actual written criticism in a way that seems natural ...”

“... has wonderful titles: ‘Your News Hour Is Now Two Hours’ or ‘Cardio Room, Young Women’s Christian Association’ or ‘Your Premiums Will Never Increase’. As good as anything by Eno). I am floundering. The only reservation I have about the book is that it leaves out a number of other, equally marvellous poems. Perhaps that’s where I should ...”