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“... or solid, savoury or sweet, for industrial or domestic use. In current agricultural jargon, it’s a ‘flex crop’. Around 1921, an American chemist marvelled at the ability of vegetable oils to transmute ‘into all sorts of substances useful to man’ and predicted that they would soon be seen as ‘of greater importance to the human race than the great ...”

“... Philip Roth’s new novel is marvellously rich, boisterously serious, dense, fizzing and formally audacious. More than with most novels, to review it is to betray it. This isn’t inappropriate, since one of Roth’s abiding themes is fiction’s betrayal of life and the novelist’s treachery to those who surround him ...”

“... the circuses of Rome to the travelling menageries of the 18th and 19th centuries, shuttered in so that passers-by got no free view; and as he says (and I saw for myself last year in Yunnan), in China and many emerging economies such horrors are still standard. The history of zoos encapsulates all human attitudes to our fellow ...”

“... When one of them left his notebook behind, we found it empty, with the single heading: ‘Bernal’s Bloody Business’. Now, 28 years after his death, a book about him has appeared.* It is made up of 12 essays by different authors plus his D-Day diaries. Bernal never talked about himself, only about the world around him. Much of what I have now read about the ...”

“... The Ghost Writer is Philip Roth’s best novel yet. Certainly it is his most ingenious. But this familiar way of putting things may contain a mistake, a mistake which is part of the subject-matter of Roth’s book. ‘Best novel yet’ implies a future of prosperous activity which may be barmecidal ...”

“... wildly out of control. Disorder is the norm; and self-understanding a bitter joke. If Roth’s characters discover that ‘the direction of life is toward incoherence,’ their creator appears to believe that the direction of writing is towards coherence. The slovenliness of living is matched by the severity of thinking. Few writers have striven ...”

“... In Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer, 23-year-old Nathan Zuckerman, ‘already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman’, makes a jaunty pilgrimage to the clapboard farmhouse of Emanuel Lonoff, the great Jewish-American writer whose work Zuckerman admires but aims to surpass ...”

“... the Poles looted us, then these came with their whoops and noise, took away all my wife’s belongings.’ A girl: ‘You’re a Jew, aren’t you? We’re in trouble, we’re going to be looted, don’t go to bed.’ Night. The lantern by the window. A Hebrew grammar-book. My soul aches. Zuckerman the assistant ...”

“... of a novel of my own, it reproduces the Liverpool Stubbs, ‘The Green Monkey’. But Mr Turner’s subtitle is ‘Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind’ (in which the superfluous comma after ‘pain’ might pass, if one is being polite, for pastiche of Victorian punctuation). It sits ill on a picture not merely pre-Victorian in fact (painted ...”

“... Suffering pain, writer’s block, and the rage of critics, Philip Roth’s hero Zuckerman resolves to quit writing fiction and go to medical school. ‘Who quarrels with an obstetrician?’ he reasons: He catches what comes out and everybody loves him ...”

“... popular culture or counterculture as much as in the thoughts and passions of characters. Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) chronicled the rise of superhero comics in postwar America. Díaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) described its hero’s ...”

“... Until the beginning of this century, few Englishmen thought it necessary at all. The Navy, so it was hoped, would defend our shores (probably against the French) and the Army would police, and where necessary extend, the Empire. Both Services went their own ways to general public approval, so long as they made ...”

“... one, adopted to reassure others. Given his disjunctions, reassurance isn’t easily provided. He’s earnest but doesn’t take himself seriously; hard-working but prone to dreaminess; ‘unadventuresome’ but resourceful; socially engaged and a good listener (large parts of the Bascombe quintet are comprised of his conversations with others, many of them ...”

“... was 21 and Eileen 23. I seldom saw either of them from then until after the outbreak of Hitler’s war, when my husband and I used to take weekend refuge from London bombing raids at a pub in the Chiltern village of Fingest. Opposite this was a house where Bernal had for some years been living with Margaret Gardiner and their son Martin – then a most ...”

“... Afew​ years ago, while looking at some early examples of children’s books, I came across a richly coloured catechism listing dos and don’ts: good little children don’t pull the wings off butterflies, or tease their tabby cat, and – this was an expensive, finely printed volume from the early 19th century – a good boy doesn’t throw his footman out of the window ...”