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“... definitively with one view or another, though he expresses healthy doubts about some of the more ‘fabulous stories of the poets’ – that Prometheus moulded the first people out of clay, for example – and the ‘no less incredible’ theories of some philosophers, such as Empedocles’ idea that ‘in the beginning individual members were produced ...”

“... Thomas and Katia Mann had six children. It was clear from early on that Katia most loved the second child, Klaus, who was born in 1906, and that Thomas loved Erika, the eldest, born in 1905, and also Elisabeth, born in 1918. The other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919 ...”

“... yourself. Then we began to go through the details of the death certificate. Name: Hugh Swynnerton Thomas. Date of death: 7 May 2017. Your relation to him? Son. A few years ago, when I asked my father why he wasn’t going to the house in south-west France where he had for several summers spent a few weeks, his answer sounded straightforward. ‘Too far from ...”

“... The publishers say that The Poetry of Edward Thomas is the first full-length study to deal exclusively with Thomas’s poetry (in Britain, they must mean). On the face of it, a six-decade gap of this sort shows a strange failure in critical husbandry. Yet it is not really so surprising ...”

“... The story of Doubting Thomas, examined at length in this learned and fascinating book, has its origin in a brief passage near the end of St John’s Gospel. After the crucifixion, when the disciples were assembled behind locked doors ‘for fear of the Jews’, Jesus appeared among them and displayed the wounds in his hands and side ...”

“... India who adopted the practice. Having your menagerie painted was also expensive: Martin imported more than 17,000 sheets of fine watercolour paper. Indian artists worked in traditional stone-based pigments and used Mughal techniques, but took European natural history images as their models. Shaikh Zain ud-Din, one of the earliest and best practitioners of ...”

“... R.S. Thomas’s four autobiographies (four memoiressays, really) were written in Welsh, and the most substantial of the four – first published in Wales a dozen years ago – was titled Neb, which means ‘nobody’: as in ‘a nobody’ or ‘nobody very special’. And this fits with our uncertain view of Thomas these past four decades ...”

“... somewhat by the singer’s sense of his own life lacking much direction or purpose; and it’s more than aware that dying young isn’t on its own enough of an achievement to turn someone into James Dean. ‘Too Late to Die Young’ points up, too, the contradictions of being both a star and a human being, in terms not only of what consitutes the good ...”

“... teachers found him ‘quite satisfactory’, but thought he ‘would be better still if he brought more enthusiasm to his work’. He’s quoted in Crap Towns: ‘I wish I could think of just one nice thing I could tell you about Hull, oh yes . . . It’s very nice and flat for cycling.’ Crap Towns lists famous residents, but not famous disparagers. Spike ...”

“... how disproportionate it was, and right, too, that being white is one of the factors that make it more likely your murder will be news (others include being young, female, photogenic and having a name that’s short enough to fit across the front page of a tabloid newspaper). More recently, Blair’s been unfairly attacked ...”

“... book set’, and the Observer has said that, ‘as literary festivals go, Port Eliot could not be more rock’n’roll if it tried.’ The telling phrase here of course being ‘as literary festivals go’, since, let’s face it, writers aren’t popstars, however much some of them would like to be, and publishing isn’t rock’n’roll. Twenty years ...”

“... in the medieval Umbrian town of Orvieto every autumn since 1996. Spasso is an Italian noun that more or less corresponds to the English ‘leisure’. Andare a spasso is ‘to go for a walk’; essere a spasso is ‘to be out of work’: mandare qualcuno a spasso is ‘to give someone the sack’, not to send them out for a stroll. Gusto means ...”

“... and Where They Came From by André Bernard (Norton, $19.95). Literary models don’t get much more famous than the Delamare case: in that (obvious) sense, the pronouncement of Flaubert’s which Bernard takes for his title is transparently absurd. In another (no less obvious) sense, however, Flaubert couldn’t be ...”

“... biography of something which couldn’t in all honesty be said ever to have had a life. One of the more glaring recent additions to the latter category is Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography by Dominic Streatfeild (Virgin, £20). How, even supposing a ‘biography’ of the drug is possible, would you set about getting it authorised? Who would you ask? George ...”

“... bench as Labour’s Spokesman on Trade and Industry, he said in an LRB Diary: ‘There is nothing more ridiculous than the notion that socialism is inexorably dying . . . The world we face today makes a socialist approach all the more relevant . . . The 1990s will not see the continuing triumph of the market, but its ...”