“... to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.’ Nash returned to England in 1918 to resume his career as a painter: but he knew it would have to be a different career, because he was a different painter, ‘a war artist’, as he put it, ‘without a war’. He knew, as ...”

“... to become extremely homosocial). Indeed, although in most parts of the West ‘coming out’ may now be easier than it has ever been, there seems to be a renewed enthusiasm for publishing narratives about the discovery and affirmation of our identity. But we should recognise that the long, largely undetected influence of the case study has also kept gay ...”

“... lay the groundwork for the Lib Dems’ decision to form a coalition government with the Tories in May 2010. Laws, who became chief secretary to the Treasury, wrote that, without The Orange Book, ‘it is much more difficult to imagine’ the coalition ‘being formed and sustained’. Marshall became an enthusiastic supporter of austerity: he called for even ...”

“... despite the black hole in Russian memory into which the dissidents have currently fallen, they may someday be rediscovered by Russian historians and myth-makers and made part of a ‘usable past’ for the nation. As he points out, this happened to wartime anti-Nazis in Germany in the 1970s after decades of German amnesia. I must have mellowed on the ...”

“... most creative pioneering encounters with contemporary cultures. In that respect, the Jesuits may be said to have prepared the ground for the 18th-century Enlightenment through their intellectual adventurousness and their frank admiration for the societies they met in India, China and Japan. They lacked in these countries the military backing of European ...”

“... to spend time with: the scene where they set off together for Vermont to find a diamond that may have been lost in the ashes of Sony’s father (don’t ask) is spectacularly embarrassing. The depiction of Grazina is no better. She is given lines such as ‘words cast spells … That’s why it’s called spelling.’ Vuong’s depiction of Hai and ...”

“... in its English translation, Perfection; Balle has joked that the English translation of her book may be its true version, because why would the Anglo-Belgian Tara write in Danish?* The novel is gloriously Schengen-y: patched together from German political philosophy, French fiction, Norwegian fragmentation. But what if all these styles were people, in one ...”

“... sued their adoptive parents for reparations? One adoptee tested against his will later said: ‘It may seem violent, but I left the office liberated. They took a backpack off my back.’Gilliland writes that she chose Guillermo in part because of his story’s ‘complexity’. This refers not just to the estrangement between him and his sister but also to the ...”

“... more than a code of recycled clichés. This is one reason Beckmann was overlooked then, and it may have slowed the reception of Kentridge as well. Yet the appreciation did come eventually; if Kentridge began in a state of siege, today he has advanced to a stage of spectacle. Theatrical at root, his talents were eventually tapped for grand productions of ...”

“... her. She rejoined Labour in 1944, agreeing with the Party’s National Agent that ‘whilst there may have been criticism of Labour’ in her journalism, ‘there was no wickedness in it.’ Bevan had told her in 1932 that ‘it is the Labour Party or nothing ... it is the party that we have taught millions of working people to look to and regard as their ...”

“... I’m doing this translation is to earn money to pay bills and feed my family. Attractive as it may sound, I don’t live in a situation where ‘there is only the mind.’ There are also electricity bills, phone bills, Kellogg’s cornflakes. The world of the other, the contingent other, is unbelievably abundant and solid around here. My children eat huge ...”

“... without cost. And Garcia Marquez does not spare us the details of these costs, however much we may be cheering Ariza on. ‘For her sake he had won fame and fortune without too much concern for his methods,’ we are told. When Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza embark on what is to be a dazzling river trip at the book’s end, we see what cost the earth ...”

“... teeth, in the hope that some of them will thrive. (‘Don’t talk to me about unemployment. They may have been unemployed but they could afford expensive motor-bikes, and two of them had cigarettes hanging out of their mouths.’) The narrative, after several pages of convoluted actuarial prose, comes to life with a burst of scene-setting worthy of Enid ...”

“... that is wrong with his music.’ ‘To show mastery is to be as clear and short as possible (which may be long).’ It is good to learn from the editor’s Introduction that ‘the papers in the estate contain a large number of delightfully focused aphorisms’, since this is clearly what Keller did best. Behind the specific topics – binding them together on ...”

“... of it. On my pay – then, I think, 13 shillings a day – this was quite a serious mulct, and I may have shown that I was a bit upset. So later he made his kind of amends. The party continued in his hotel room, where we were joined by some girls, provenance unknown – he had a knack of surrounding himself with young women, not whores, but willing on terms ...”