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“... Can this beautiful young model be thinking?’ Tim Parks asks at one point in this book. ‘One hopes not,’ the argument continues, as Parks’s narrator looks through an airline magazine, ‘You do not think, I thought, seeing pictures of people pleasure-making on the beach, perhaps in an advertisement for rum or Martini ...”

“... At some point in his mid-forties, the novelist Tim Parks developed a terrible pain, near-constant and located in embarrassing places: his lower abdomen and crotch. ‘I had quite a repertoire of pains at this point: a general smouldering tension throughout the abdomen, a sharp jab in the perineum, an electric shock darting down the inside of the thighs, an ache in the small of the back, a shivery twinge in the penis itself ...”

“... contraband, the deserted villas of arrested Camorra bosses. He attends the funerals of murder victims and the trials of their killers; he is in the street when Camorra communities raise barriers against police raids. But most of all Saviano wants to be at the scene of the crime: to see the shattered windscreens and the corpses riddled with bullets, to hear ...”

“... and again leaves us with an unsolved crime (in this case we are not even sure whether the victim will die or not). Many of Gadda’s shorter pieces turn out to be fragments of unfinished novels, or of almost finished novels that he broke up into fragments, a habit which has prompted critics and editors to spend a lot of ...”

“... theme – he is unashamedly didactic. Death breeds fear and fear breeds religion and social timidity, which reduce us to an oppressed half-life from which we break out at our peril. Childhood may be relatively happy – it offers, as the young narrator Marcus tells us in Indignation, ‘unimperilled, unchanging days when everybody felt safe and settled ...”

“... in his great study of the Italian Renaissance, ‘of that half-religious loyalty by which the legitimate princes of the West were supported.’ The removal of the apex of the medieval hierarchy did not lead to the system’s total collapse. In the 14th century, an attempt by the Florentine woolworkers to get rid of the wealthy oligarchs who had ditched the ...”

“... wide-open eyes stared now at the book, now at my lips, from which the story was flowing and sometimes at the gap between my lips and the book as if she were seeking the invisible spirit that was communicating to me. I heard her uneven breath stopping and starting, following the rhythm of the drama … By the time I ...”

“... I met with a farmer at the end of some fallow field, I would stop to look at this man whose seedtime was spent in the shadow of the same wheat among which he would soon be reaped.’ When the Memoirs are not ‘a registry of deaths’, they are a chronicle of exile. ‘On leaving my mother’s womb, I underwent my first exile,’ Chapter 3 begins. Baby ...”

“... to shade the lily’. There were so many women in his life, so many incidents with women – the time he hid for days in a cellar to enjoy his beloved, the time he sprang from a cupboard to catch an unfaithful mistress in flagrante – that any Stendhal biography risks becoming a procession of them. From his mother, whose ...”

“... insistence that a peaceful world depended on the spread of democratic republics, that makes him a timely object of study. The more, however, one reads the essays in Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism 1830-1920, the less enthusiastic one feels about the man’s ideas, and the more fascinated by the man. Born in Genoa in 1805, his ...”

“... Boötes, the Herdsman, in the northern sky! And that this name was also borne by a king in ancient times, the commander of a band of faithful followers: all heroes, like the king himself, and treated by the king as equals, as brothers. Unfortunately, I later discovered that that famous Arthur, king of Britain, was not a true story, only a legend; and so I ...”

“... When Tim Parks reviewed Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Ground beneath Her Feet, in the New York Review of Books he grumbled ‘that the sheer quantity of events that crowd these 575 pages is such as to overwhelm any depiction of inner life or any mind’s attempt to grasp the half of them’. By the end of his piece he is thoroughly exasperated: ‘By making the double gesture of appearing clear-sighted and then filling his pages with supernatural incident and metaphysical muddle that could mean anything or nothing, Rushdie, and many like him [my italics], play to those who, while understandably unwilling to subscribe to any belief so well defined as to be easily knocked down, nevertheless yearn to have all the mystical balls kept perpetually spinning in the air before them ...”

“... Tim Parks’s latest novel opens in the forests of the South Tyrol, where a group of white-water enthusiasts are taking a kayaking holiday. The river is overflowing with melt water from a thawing glacier, and the kayakers find themselves endangered by the force of the current, as the river runs ever faster and fuller ...”

“... peculiar about the mind’, ‘esiste o non esiste’ has come down to ‘exists or not’ this time. For some reason I’m not even worried about that now. For ‘precede ogni altro’ I’ve chosen ‘comes before’ rather than the cognate ‘precedes’. I’ve noticed I have a habit of going for the Anglo-Saxon where I can. Is this a valuable intuition ...”

“... stairs and carried the shotgun out to the pick-up too. Jack and Tom were both in the yard at the time, but felt from the way their father was looking and moving that they shouldn’t speak. Then Michael went into the kitchen where Luke was by now confined to his blanket in a corner – beyond even padding his way to the door – and lifted him up and carried ...”