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“... In the spring​ of 1801 a young man called Hans Jonathan left the mansion in Copenhagen where he worked as a slave. Going for a walk was allowed: despite his status, he had a degree of autonomy within the walls of the city, then a thriving port with around one hundred thousand inhabitants. But this time he didn’t return ...”

“... every day from nine until noon so that curious fans can ‘watch her creative juices flow’. At Jonathan Safran Foer’s website – www.theprojectmuseum.com – the interactive pages are more high-minded. The site makes brief mention of Everything Is Illuminated – the American writer’s first novel, written at the age of 20 – but the description is ...”

“... never ‘write “I” any more,’ for ‘in art, don’t you see, there is no first person.’ Jonathan Dollimore sees in the conflict between Gide’s courageous ‘essentialist ethic’ and Wilde’s uncompromising ‘transgressive aesthetic’ a paradigm of the internal contradictions of homosexual theory and a preamble to ‘the modern history of ...”

“... location, topic or domain is added to the theoretical competence of architecture.’Denise Scott Brown, overlooked co-author of the ham-fisted National Gallery extension (with her much praised husband, Robert Venturi), wrote that ‘architects lost their social concern: the architect as macho evolutionary was succeeded as the architect as dernier cri of the ...”

“... are used by street gangs in Los Angeles.] Also due in March is a memoir called Self Abuse by Jonathan Self. Whether or not he may have any famous relatives is hinted at in the John Murray catalogue, which tells us that Self’s father, ‘Professor Self’, from whose lips ‘the word love never escaped,’ was ‘“fond” of his wife, “fond” of ...”

“... colour’ she assigns to the period – 1945-60 – is a foggy sort of greyish brown. Dickens’s monumental fog in Bleak House is perhaps correctly reckoned by Nead to be metaphorical. She doesn’t state what it’s a metaphor for. Presumably the torpid, sclerotic chaos of Chancery. But the impasto fog and smog (a coinage not made till ...”

“... and are the one in charge, even if you end up getting apples instead because the pears look bad. Jonathan Meades is a writer who understands the power of lists. In An Encyclopedia of Myself, he has written not so much an autobiography as a series of detailed inventories of English provincial life in the 1950s – a world of sadistic army majors and ...”

“... Hill has an Arab headdress, or why Lord Home stands bat in hand before a broken wicket. Craig Brown says that in his caricatures Boxer mixed ‘the base and the suave’, but there is not a lot of baseness here, not much of the Rowlandson; and such fluent drawing can hardly help flattering the sitter. What Brown calls ...”

“... an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it?’ Jonathan Franzen’s memoir, The Discomfort Zone, is an object lesson in the management of such obscenity. The book begins with a loss. After lengthy treatment for colon cancer, his widowed mother, Irene, has died. The youngest of three brothers who’ve fled the ...”

“... or at the very least erratic at keeping his sentences under control: ‘A footloose brown girl-woman with a funny voice, an ex-servant, unmarried, inexplicably hanging around in Guatemala now, who’d so far gotten to live an eccentrically and remotely fortunate life thanks to her extremely coincidental connection to Mirabel Arrau de Graetz’s ...”

“... a can) on toast, presented as a delicacy but which made me gag; sandwiches of pre-sliced brown bread, with the faintest smear of margarine, and Shippam’s paste; then raspberries picked from the bushes in Granny’s back garden. When the meal was over, I was given permission to get down from the table and play with Charles, my favourite of the two ...”

“... how streets were lighted’. A few lines later in the same passage, she describes ‘the reddish brown of the stone houses, the curve and slope of the streets, the constantly changing sky’ not as ‘beautiful’ or ‘splendid’ or ‘heartbreaking’ but as ‘satisfactory’; and not just satisfactory, but ‘satisfactory in a way that I now realise ...”

“... and The Topeka School, Lerner the writer – born in Topeka, school debating champion, graduate of Brown, Fulbright fellow in Madrid, now poet and novelist, resident in Brooklyn and married with two girls – has received a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant; when early copies of The Topeka School arrived in London and New York, I heard ...”

“... those who are content simply to bang it together with panel pins and a tube or two of Gripfill. Jonathan Coe is undoubtedly the craftsman – a counter-sinking, dove-tailing, professional-finishing kind of writer. But he does get away with the occasional bodge. The framing device for his new novel, The Rotters’ Club, for example, seems to be held together ...”

“... first set eyes on Peter, at lunch in a restaurant, I think on Goodge Street, with Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, the meeting arranged by John Bassett, whose idea it was that we should all work together writing the review that turned into Beyond the Fringe. Having already written while still an undergraduate a large slice of the two West End shows Pieces of ...”