“... want of occupation’. Although he lived beyond his means, his was the relatively small-scale, soberly-incurred, financial anxiety of the overstretched professional man, not the profligacy of the aristocrat. Educating his children, paying their medical bills, keeping up appearances – these were the sources of sleeplessness. When his ...”

“... more than life-size; they take you by the scruff and hold your eye. Accompanying The Burghers is a small bronze of the final version of Balzac as well as the striding nude study for it in plaster (shown here). Elsewhere there is a plaster of The Kiss at the original size, as well as the enlarged marble version from the Tate. The Thinker is there, ...”

“... language because they’re bound to learn yours. The Conservative prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, and the man who on present showing is likely to be prime minister of Australia after September, Tony Abbott, have spoken up for the Anglosphere. In Britain, the Anglosphere is held up as an alternative way to exercise influence in the world by ...”

“... Adecade ago​ , the musician Stephen Coates was in St Petersburg to play a concert with his band. While he was there, some Russian friends took him to a flea market, where he found and bought a strange, unmarked disc. Back in London, he put it on: it was ‘Rock around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets. He held up the disc to the light and saw two skeletal hands ...”

“... hands across an ocean, to the bound hands of John Williams, a minister of religion in Deerfield, a small settlement in New England. Europe’s conflicts are echoed and mimicked in this precarious, snow-bound frontier territory. The winter of 1703 to 1704 had been a season of ugly rumour, of a defensive huddle in the stockade, of a phoney war. And in the ...”

“... the heroic couplet, the staples of English versification from the 16th to the 19th century, seem small-timers by comparison. Sestinas have come and gone. Ottava rima and rhyme royal had their day, but lost favour when readers ceased to want long poems which combined storytelling with epigrammatic cleverness. Even now, when set poetic forms are generally ...”

“... if the retail sector has been taken over by Lebanese, Mauritanians and, lately, Chinese, and few small and medium-size French companies remain (most went out of business after a looting spree in 2004), Ivory Coast still has the appearance of a ‘colonised economy’. This, for France, is the worst of both worlds: a bad neocolonial image but no real ...”

“... Stephen King has occasionally raised a rueful protest against being typed as a horror writer – even with the consolation of being the best-selling horror writer in the history of the world. But, as he disarmingly reminds us, there is worse literary company than Lovecraft, Leiber, Bloch, Matheson and Jackson. ‘I could, for example, be an “important” writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers ...”

“... clerk, examining the author’s credit card in Seattle, asked him if he was related to the poet Stephen Spender. Assured of his customer’s identity, the clerk expressed his pleasure: ‘Gee, a near-celebrity.’ No doubt the status of full celebrity was reserved for movie stars and ball-players. At any rate there is little doubt that Spender is the most ...”

“... Their stories correspond, but not in time or place. Phillips’s travellers leave their small Caribbean island for Britain in the 1950s, when prospects were cheery. The white folks of the West had never had it so good: too good, or so their masters told them, to settle at menial labours. Since the publication of her first novel, Brown ...”

“... with the work of Kipling, or Katherine Mansfield. But a story like Nabil Gorgy’s ‘Cairo is a small city’, though still intimately concerned with justice and injustice, employs the magical, repetitive form of the folk-tale to bring Engineer Adil Salim to a sticky end: he perishes as the guilty victim of a ritualised murder, administered by a Bedouin ...”

“... debt’. But this comparison, justified though it may be, is bound to make the deliberately small-scale character of Cooper’s achievement all the more evident. Scenes from Metropolitan Life is largely about the withering of worldly ambitions, ranging from the prospect of heady promotions in the Civil Service to the more personal goal of a happy and ...”

“... past, however, the pace of Pinget translations seems to have been hotted up by an enterprising small press in New York, Red Dust, who have not only reinstated the missing Passacaglia out proceeded to fill most remaining gaps with their stylish and relatively cheap publications. That Voice (Pinget’s penultimate novel, dating from 1975) appears in the ...”

“... around Watsonville. What about Rothstein’s Fleeing a Dust Storm, in which a father and two small boys struggle heads lowered against the blast, the smaller child lagging behind, trying to rub the dust out of his eyes? Again, there is only one parent in the shot: the family is evidently disintegrating. So is the house behind them, a miserable hut of ...”

“... out: incentives by the Chinese government are almost unheard of at the individual level or for small enterprises; the state has not produced an official narrative about its citizens’ forays into Africa; air fares between China and Africa are not subsidised; mostly family-based chain migration prevails, with certain provinces – Guangdong (the former ...”