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“... Perhaps all books are messages from other times and places, even the ones written yesterday and just down the road. But these three works by Kenzaburo Oë, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, have an unusual flavour of missives cast into the sea long ago, only now arriving on our island beach. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids was published in Japan in 1958, and is now translated for the first time ...”

“... of Roth’s intricately arranged performances. As in American Pastoral, his familiar alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, presents himself as an observer rather than a participant. At the beginning of the novel, he is living alone in the Berkshire woods, where he enjoys a visit from his old high-school English teacher, Murray Ringold. As the 90-year-old Murray ...”

“... about the screen-mediation of reality. In his philosophic commonplace book Straw Dogs (2002), John Gray propounded a new theory of consciousness: ‘In evolutionary prehistory consciousness emerged as a side-effect of language. Today it is a by-product of the media.’ Cronenberg is one of a burgeoning group of artists who are attempting to describe what ...”

“... used vociferously to demand, who will analyse the analysts, if not the artist? Philip Roth, like John Updike, is a survivor from the glory days of the heavyweights, the Hemingways and the Faulkners and the Bellows. His first book, the story collection Goodbye, Columbus, published in 1959, won the National Book Award, a notable achievement for a tyro in his ...”

“... he does say so, but then (this being the structural trick of the book) he enlists his character Nathan Zuckerman to play devil’s advocate and make the opposite case. Zuckerman’s argument is that Maggie was the best creative-writing teacher anyone could have, and someone who forced him to stop taking people at face value. To neutralise Maggie’s ...”

“... he crosses out the word ‘harness’. Over on this side of the Channel, the native-born author John Braine chooses for his epigraph a snatch of neo-Romantic whimsy from the lyrics of the group Supertramp: Just as long as there’s two of us, just as long as there’s two of us I’ll carry on. Mutatis mutandis, here is the same, rather deprecatory ...”

“... points and a fourth hanging from one of the rubies. It was commissioned as a shoulder-clasp by John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, ‘years before his murder’ in 1467, and passed through various hands, including those of Elizabeth I – she can be seen wearing the jewel in the ‘Ermine Portrait’ that hangs in Hatfield House – until it was finally ...”

“... he does tell entirely straight. Framing the (strangely brief) autobiography is an exchange with Nathan Zuckerman – the hero and sometimes the narrator of the Eighties trilogy. Roth’s letter requesting his alter ego’s imprimatur forms a preface to The Facts. Roth explains how he came to write it. Its quest for ‘original prefictionalised ...”

“... Revolution or its principles, and the feeling was mirrored on the other side of the ocean. John Adams told James Madison in 1798 that ‘there was not a single principle the same in the American and French Revolutions.’ Even Jefferson, one of the great American admirers of France, had lost his enthusiasm for its revolution. Many influential modern ...”

“... computer games. Unlike most of Philip Roth’s recent novels, Operation Shylock does not feature Nathan Zuckerman, the celebrity-writer persona Roth adopted for his fiction from The Ghost Writer (1979) to The Counterlife (1987). Instead, Operation Shylock stars Philip Roth. Only there are two of them. One is Roth the famous and universally admired writer who ...”

“... To put it bluntly, have things been getting better or worse? It is not the least virtue of Mark Nathan Cohen’s revaluation of the ‘diseases of civilisation’ question that he does not push a simple solution. He offers a qualified pessimism about the past, and a question-mark for the future. Cultural anthropology and economic history have generally told ...”

“... quiescent Palestinian leadership in Ramallah and disrupt the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that John Kerry had launched in the same month as Sisi’s coup. But Hamas felt too vulnerable, especially because of Sisi’s potential role in any new conflict between Gaza and Israel, to take this route. It was sure that the peace talks would fail on their own. The ...”

“... story ‘The Animal in the Synagogue’ with the words: ‘Look away, look away, look away.’ John Wray and Nathan Englander in English and Alejandro Zambra in Spanish all have a phrase about the impossibility of getting rid of the creature – and I’m guessing that Etgar Keret has something similar in ...”

“... our time’, Aleksandar Hemon as ‘quite frankly, the greatest writer of our generation’, and Nathan Englander as ‘quite simply, one of the very best we have’. He has called Emma Donoghue ‘one of the great literary ventriloquists’ and John Boyne ‘one of the great craftsmen in contemporary literature’. Gerard ...”

“... the kind of insecurity that Philip Roth explores in The Prague Orgy. His American hero, the famous Nathan Zuckerman, spends a few days in Czechoslovakia in 1976, is bugged the whole time and finally ushered out of the country by a passport officer with the courteous farewell: ‘Ah, Zuckerman, the Zionist agent. An honour to have entertained you ...”