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“... to come forward from the cast of sad sacks. ‘Victory Lap’ is about two teenage neighbours in a small town. Alison, three days short of her 15th birthday, is a Little Miss Perfect who thinks ‘everyone is a rainbow,’ except perhaps her hometown suitors: ‘she felt hopeful that {special one} would hail from far away. The local boys possessed a certain je ...”

“... will be no dancing, no music, no dreaming tonight. There will only be a bollocking. Here, the small scale of the story is its point, its tiny observations a strength. Even more important, it shows no signs of having been written to order. A sense that the writers were not at work with a photocopied manifesto tacked up above their desks marks out the other ...”

“... with The Infinitesimals, in between.) Kasischke’s poems let some of us say about them what Helen Vendler once said about the early books of Adrienne Rich: ‘someone my age was writing down my life.’ Kasischke has chronicled her generation, the generation where wild kids learned to smoke, and then learned, as adults, never to smoke: the memory of ...”

“... allowed to attend university, and has worked – multitasking, in the manner of gifted people in small populations – as a teacher, magazine editor, journalist and screenwriter. Currently she is research director at the Institute of Studies of Communist Genocide in Albania, which one wishes for the author’s sake might be a sinecure, but almost certainly ...”

“... shopfronts, but you could walk into the Regal, ‘buy’ a ticket and take a seat in front of a small screen. The transport museum has since been rehoused and the Kelvin Hall is a strange combination of leisure centre and museum collections. When I visited in March, three large folders were waiting for me on a trolley. The earliest documents are from ...”

“... the life and all the works, if you are properly to grasp his importance. Here, though, there is small danger of his simply or routinely rehandling the facts, and this book, for all its oddness, is much better Burgess than its predecessor, partly because Burgess himself comes into it a lot, having a much livelier relationship with Lawrence than with St ...”

“... sellers have to innovate continuously and do so faster than their rivals. The best way is through small entrepreneurial groups linked to trusted brands. At their core are talented geeks and shrinks, in ever greater demand. The enterprise must also continuously cut costs, pushing down wages of routine workers, and flattening all hierarchies into fast-changing ...”

“... swathed in a mantle of the deepest sable, an allegory of Winter. This costume book, kept in a small museum in Brunswick, the Herzog Anton Ulrich, has elements of another popular print series: Schwarz’s poses might seem to be setting out the Ages of Man. Although the album is the result of an individual’s unprecedented interest in the phases of his own ...”

“... Jan Gay​ was born Helen Reitman in Leipzig in 1902. She came out as a lesbian in young adulthood, studied under the German sexologist Magnus Hirshfield, started a nudist colony with her partner, Zhenya, and eventually collected interviews with hundreds of queer women in European cities, in the hope that writing up their sexual histories would help make lesbianism more accepted ...”

“... guests’, as Benita, the eldest, puts it: required to perform at parties and balls, to train for small feats of bourgeois showmanship, as when Twinkle, their dog, triumphs at a Westchester show.Benita, girly and beautiful, is born to do it, but Peggy, with her mussy hair and nose ‘elegant as a potato’, finds all the camouflaging and performing ...”

“... the perceived benefit is to get well or to get high. After the Trojan War, according to Homer, Helen gave Telemachus a draught of nepenthe – almost certainly a reference to a Theban opium – to ‘banish memories’ and ‘calm grief and anger’. I am not sure whether this was medical or recreational. The use of hallucinogens in mystical and ...”

“... until it was reported missing in 2000 – stolen perhaps by the citizens of Leeuwarden, the small town where she was born, which is preparing to turn her childhood home into a museum. Mata Hari figured in the interwar imagination as the archetypal spy-seductress. The myth took shape in newspapers and books; numerous avatars appeared; Dietrich and Garbo ...”

“... been told before, and was set in its wider English and American contexts especially thoroughly by Helen Carr in The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists (2009), a monumental work to which Vivien Whelpton acknowledges a debt. Whelpton, however, has done her own research, and, though occasionally her text can be confused and confusing when ...”

“... so far as Lewis adopted any fixed denominational identity). These two became the centre of a small group of (male) friends in Oxford with similar tastes, later known as the Inklings, who met regularly in a pub or in college rooms to talk and sometimes to read and discuss drafts of work in progress. The leading members of the group, which included the ...”

“... Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’, which I used to introduce a review in the LRB of Helen Vendler’s seminal study of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I get up at six the next morning, and rewrite it from memory, trying to draw out the pattern of ‘o’ sounds, the plosives, the guttural ‘k’ sounds and those liquid ‘l’s, which culminate in the ...”