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“... methods, but it’s a bit like having someone walking over your grave a bit too soon.’ Alice Munro was there as well, glowing like a microfiche machine that contained clippings of all the weird prairie marriages that had taken place in the nation’s history. Engel was living in a renaissance, which is always a jostle full of human elbows and noise and ...”

“... sort of cheating. This is not so much the case with male singers: I don’t think Caruso, Matt Munro, Perry Como or Tony Bennett have been written about as tragic lives (though Chet Baker, with the sweet girlie voice that none of the divas had, probably belongs on the women’s side). Even the neurotic Sinatra is mostly known for having fun. Singing for ...”

“... has written herself into a craftsmanlike tradition running back from William Trevor and Alice Munro, via Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield and Dubliners, to the Russians translated by Constance Garnett. She has been admired since the beginning of her career for her restraint and the air of naturalness she gives her effects. It isn’t hard to imagine her ...”

“... At the beginning of her short story ‘Jakarta’, Alice Munro describes two young women who choose a spot on a beach because it’s sheltered and because ‘they want to be out of sight of a group of women who use the beach every day. They call these women the Monicas.’ The Monicas have two or three or four children apiece; they build a temporary domestic encampment on the beach (‘diaper bags, picnic hampers, inflatable rafts and whales, toys, lotions’); and their conversation revolves around the cheapest place to buy meat, the uses of zinc ointment, soda’s superiority to baking powder ...”

“... Medicis were at the root of that disgust at ‘vanity’, how is it that a catechist called Blind Munro could incite poorly-off Scottish islanders to make bonfires of their harps and fiddles early last century? My own local paper in Aberdeen, just forty years ago, reported sermons preached by ministers in Buchan against the wickedness that had brought down ...”

“... the Grossmiths. Saki lends a caustic distinction to that company. His real name was Hector Hugh Munro and he was born in Burma in 1870, the son of an inspector-general of the Burma police. Two years later his mother died after a miscarriage caused by being charged by a cow in an English lane, an incident which did not prevent her son writing about women ...”

“... pieces being extremely short is that quite modestly substantial ones (by the standards of Alice Munro, let alone Henry James) come to seem monumental. Two of these longer pieces, not widely separated in the book, make claim to some sort of symmetry with their titles (‘The Cows’ and ‘The Seals’), when in fact they represent opposite extremes of ...”

“... In a letter in the Times on 8 September 1809, W.M. Munro, a schoolmaster, described seeing a mermaid off the coast of Caithness. Walking along the shore of Sandside Bay, his attention was ‘arrested by the appearance of a figure resembling an unclothed human female, sitting upon a rock extending into the sea, and apparently in the action of combing its hair, which flowed around its shoulders’, and was ‘of a light brown colour ...”

“... Big Man’ is Ian Paisley, and to know or guess the parts played in the history of the North by ‘Munro, Hope, Porter and McCracken’. Maybe they know that ‘sheugh’ means ditch: a paragraph in John Braidwood’s The Ulster Dialect Lexicon mentions it as ‘that Ulster favourite sheugh’, and reports that it is ‘recorded all over Scotland from Aberdeen ...”

“... EGO’ required to do the work? Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Arendt, Alice Munro, Jeanette Winterson, Anne Carson. Why am I even making this list? By the end of the book, I felt for Flaubert. ‘The humid element’, the ‘tears, chatter, breast-feeding … menses’, was too much for me, too. I was more comfortable in Part 1, where ...”

“... swim the channel, the Atlantic ocean, several lengths of the local pool, climb Mount Everest, a Munro, a plastic wall, spell more words correctly than anyone else, and in November write a novel or grow a moustache. The money you ‘earn’ will provide goods for the needy, a drip in the stream of scientific research funds, and the effort you make will buff ...”

“... University Commission critical scholarship was practised more and more in the universities. H.A.J. Munro, Professor of Latin at Cambridge from 1869 to 1872, and Ingram Bywater, Professor of Greek at Oxford from 1893 to 1908, were scholars of very great distinction. Sir Richard Jebb (1842-1905), Professor of Greek at Cambridge, was in some ways a typical ...”

“... himself only heightens the matter. Finkel becomes his writing tutor, sending stories by Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore, and buying him a copy of the New Oxford American Dictionary (‘which cost me $45.50’), as if the gift would begin to compensate Longo for the damage the journalist was about to do with words. It looks as though Longo may have killed his ...”

“... turns outward to include a staggering array of post-colonial writers, from Chinua Achebe to Alice Munro to Les Murray. (None of the ten 20th-century authors added to this edition is English.) The Longman translates US multiculturalism more obliquely into UK devolution, turning inward to trace cultural differences within the British Isles, from the ...”

“... cost of such events as the Evangelical campaigns conducted in the Highlands by the like of Blind Munro, who knew the Bible by heart and organised the burning of a great mound of bagpipes and fiddles in Snizort on Skye? Have they themselves worshipped in a Presbyterian church for several years, and if so what was the effect on their bodily imaginations or ...”