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“... Forties is wholly edited by Leon Edel, who says in his Preface that this decade, at any rate the first half of it, is pretty scrappy so far as journal entries go, and it has to be said that the whole collection does Wilson no good whatsoever: which, considering his genuine importance, is a pity. Wilson wrote incessantly, but his income was entirely derived ...”

“... had started to write commentaries on Greek poems as early as the fourth century BC. In the first place, a commentary on an ancient text must explain the meaning of the words. But a commentary need not be narrowly linguistic, like that expounded by the Victorian schoolmaster who began the term by saying to his sixth form, ‘Boys, you are about to enjoy ...”

“... But Tory MPs should be wary of putting too much faith in myths about political change in Britain. First past the post electoral systems do often produce strong majorities, but in the 21st century significant shifts have been preceded by hung Parliaments: an element of stickiness persists in the system. Tories can take more comfort, perhaps, in the sense that ...”

“... Monica Youn’s​ fourth book of poems, From From (Carcanet, £14.99), is her first to dwell at length on her Korean American background, and on the history of Asian America more generally. It’s also her first to rely primarily on long prose poems, or lyric essays, advancing sparely perspicuous, caustically disillusioned arguments about myth and history, cravings and reactions, racial distinction and white supremacy ...”

“... and true-crime writer Curt Gentry, is a police and courtroom procedural, with no shortage of first-person heroics (‘During my cross-examination of these witnesses, I scored a number of significant points’); the first corpse is discovered on page six. No one is murdered in Guinn’s book until page 232. He brings a ...”

“... turned kinky, a reminder not only of her husband’s ‘black blood’, but her own. Chester’s first exposure to the American race war took place inside his own black family. In 1923, the family suffered a catastrophe that Chester would remember as its foundational trauma. They were living in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where Joseph had taken a job at Branch ...”

“... Baedeker’s Italy, Baedeker’s France. In a sense, all Desai’s novels are Baedekers. With Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, she is the best of guides to what it’s like to be Indian, and maybe that is because she is half-German – Prawer Jhabvala is Indian only by marriage, and Polish by birth. It is usually foreigners who write guidebooks, and their access to ...”

“... Alice Sebold’s first novel, The Lovely Bones, was on its 11th US printing by the end of the summer and was sitting at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, a place usually reserved for Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy. The book’s success is a categorial surprise, since literary novels hardly ever reach a mass audience in America; but its subject-matter is so perfectly resonant with the tenor of the times that its appeal is transparent ...”

“... Revolutionary assemblies had poor acoustics. Then there was the matter of his timidity. When he first emerged on the French political scene, in the spring of 1789, he said that he ‘trembled like a child’ before each intervention. Many would have felt the fear, but few would have admitted to it. He was easy to shout down. His accent was provincial, his ...”

“... Nevertheless, he retains pleasant memories of his childhood. World’s Fair is a novel told in the first person (with some interpolations from other family members) by Edgar. Edgar’s birthday is 6 January 1931, and the narrative covers the first nine years of his life, largely spent in a house on Eastburn Avenue. His ...”

“... Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and which still alive. Bad questions have been gradually set aside ...”

“... In 2006 the Wall Street Journal declared Qiu Xiaolong’s first novel, Death of a Red Heroine (2000), one of the top five ‘political novels’ of all time for its indictment of Communism. Many of the crimes in his books have their roots in the repression of the past, but Qiu’s series about Chief Inspector Chen Cao – after Death of a Red Heroine came A Loyal Character Dancer (2002), When Red Is Black (2004), A Case of Two Cities (2006) and now Red Mandarin Dress – is actually less concerned with politics than with the contrast between victims and perpetrators ...”

“... is an allegory of other-womanhood. In 1933, three years before she exhibited Ma Gouvernante at her first solo show, Oppenheim began an affair with Max Ernst. She was 20, studying art in Paris; he was 44. His wife, the painter Marie-Berthe Aurenche, was 29. The shoes were Aurenche’s, a second-hand gift from Ernst to Oppenheim, who bound and plated them. After ...”

“... hearts, pumping away like so many little speedboat engines, her glamorous feats were kept alive. I first read about her in a ragged back number of the Ladder, the pioneering lesbian magazine published privately in the United States in the Fifties and Sixties. There, in a breathless profile (‘Her Own Private World’), she was described as ‘possibly the ...”

“... censure. Over the years he has written prodigiously about the customs, beliefs and writings of first-century Jews, and has more than once studied Jesus against that background, using material to which only great learning can have full access. He is perhaps best known as an authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, though they hardly figure at all in this ...”