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“... on men, and on being the centre of authority in their family. Ten young women in the maternity ward of a Leningrad hospital learn that they have been put in a ten-day quarantine, and decide to borrow the Florentine writer’s idea and pass the time telling each other stories. By the book’s end 100 have been told. The device works well, because the Soviet ...”

“... prosecution case against Edgar A. Poe looks a strong one. Taken in by the Richmond tobacco broker John Allan when left orphaned at the age of two by the death of his actress mother Eliza, brought up as a member of the family and sent to the University of Virginia, he responded by running up gambling debts and drinking, so that he left after a ...”

“... so sparingly, cherry-picking from already known and accessible texts. But this soon changed. John Burnett used annotated extracts to illustrate various aspects of working-class life in Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure. By 1981, David Vincent had found 142 memoirs spanning the years from 1790 to 1850, and in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom used them to ...”

“... through diet and frequent defecation. From his base at Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, John Harvey Kellogg, physician, dietary reformer, founder of the breakfast cereal empire and author of such tracts as ‘The Itinerary of a Breakfast’, proselytised against the debilitating consequences of ‘civilised’ diet, leisure and defecatory ...”

“... and a date: 1633. This was the year a local gentleman, Sir John Reresby of Thrybergh Hall, began to note the contents of his garden. Every peach, pear and plum is catalogued, as are herbs, shrubs, bulbs – ‘Kentish Codlings’, ‘the Granado Gilliflower’, ‘Melincholly Munkes hoode’ – and attempts at grafting ...”

“... Ruskin’s biography they mean a great deal. Briefly, the story is of Ruskin’s acquaintance with John and Maria La Touche, whom he probably met in 1858, four years after the annulment of his marriage; his growing love for their younger daughter Rose; his realisation that his feelings for her were romantically loving; his proposal of marriage in 1866; her ...”

“... she finds Mrs Taylor taking photographs of snails copulating, and Alan Taylor – who since John Betjeman’s death has styled himself ‘the nation’s Parkinsonist’ – lying on the floor recovering from delirium. The diarist comments: ‘Cynthia just did not know what to say: snail sexuality in the garden, delirious dreams – and from outside, the ...”

“... in the shadow of the surrounding high-rises. Stephen directs me to go through the former Fourth Ward. It is an old African-American quarter, much of it demolished to make way for new middle-income housing in the horribly bastard sub-Post-Modern style common in Houston – fanlights, balustrades, other bits of tat. Beside these, the late 19th-century rows of ...”

“... that is the best he can do. Seven years after his father’s death, the poet and novelist John Burnside stumbled almost incidentally on the facts of his early life. Talking to his mother’s sister, he learned that the elder Burnside – ‘Tommy Dick, or George McGhee, or whatever his name was’ – had been an abandoned child, found, by whom is not ...”

“... permission to use the runnels and platforms for The Vertical Line, a performance piece devised by John Berger. In Ways of Seeing, Berger presented on television for the first time an ideological analysis of art and aesthetics. One of the programmes juxtaposed pin-ups and centrefolds with Titians, in a powerful early assault on advertising. Thirty years ...”

“... presumably not the kind of item you can order from the library trolley in the intensive-care ward; nor, I suspect, will the managers of hospices want to have it around. One of the more entertaining sections of Final Exit is its review of the menu of options available to the would-be suicide. Humphry devotes a whole chapter to what he calls ‘the Cyanide ...”

“... Maybe this is a detective story,’ a character thinks in John Edgar Wideman’s novel Philadelphia Fire (1990). It’s a reasonable suspicion, and would be for anyone in any of Wideman’s books that I’ve read. But they are not detective stories. Often structured around a quest, for a missing child, a vanished woman, a former self, a meaning, an answer, they finally take the form of a flight, as if from a horror too great to bear or name, a shock one can only circle again and again, and at last abandon ...”

“... has now disappeared to be replaced by another, this time by the succeeding general editors, John Barnard and Paul Hammond. They claim fidelity to Bateson except where he has come to seem fallible. For instance, he insisted on modernising spelling and punctuation; but why modernise Browning, and why meddle with Marvell’s punctuation, which is important ...”

“... had shaken off the dust of Oak Park, Illinois, he was at least in a position to say hullo to John Updike in the office corridor. He had put enough mileage between himself and his origins to achieve urbanity. Yet it takes only a brief comparison between Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories and Updike’s Rabbit novels (or, even more to the point, Updike’s ...”

“... own. Under this heady new influence Jack wrote the story that won him his first publication (in John O’ London’s Weekly) and first fee (six guineas). His first novel to be accepted was also a Saroyanesque essay, Green to Pagan Street, though The Trouble with Harry was published first. By about 1950 he was doing well enough to set up as a full-time ...”