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“... publish A Storm from Paradise, together with a reissue of Stuart Hood’s Carlino.* Carlino is straight autobiography, recording the author’s experiences with the Italian Resistance during the war. A Storm from Paradise has equally strong but less direct roots in Hood’s past. The novel imaginatively reconstructs a crisis in the life of a Scottish ...”

“... in a Sunday newspaper in two days’ time. How can I not be manic? The next day I met the poet Michael Horowitz in the local health-food shop. The last time I bumped into him, in the same place a few months before, I was about to deliver my completed manuscript. Today, I asked him to my launch party. ‘Maybe I could review your book,’ he said. ‘That ...”

“... to lose.’The book falters in what comes next, the chapter shared by two directors, Hal Ashby and Michael Cimino. (I think Specktor realises that directors have lost their juice now.) Ashby is someone whose work you know better than you can place him – Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Being There. Cimino is an exemplary disaster: after the abrupt coup of The Deer ...”

“... but not an intraduisible in sight. As for the achievement of Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood in orchestrating the English edition, that qualifies as heroic. The French and English differ in certain important respects concerning both the choice of terms and the word order. The English has ‘philosophical lexicon’ where the French has ...”

“... smashed up his father-in-law’s desk. ‘Symbolic action’, Blok recorded pithily in his diary. Michael Gordin’s book helps to explain the action’s symbolism and its violence. Blok’s father-in-law, the desk’s first owner, was the greatest of Russian chemists, Dmitrii Mendeleev, who died in 1907 at the age of 73. Mendeleev had put himself at the ...”

“... comedies made at Ealing Studios in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Indeed, as Stubbs reminds us, Michael Balcon, the studio’s head in its heyday, was explicit in defining its mission. When Ealing was sold in 1955, he placed a plaque on the studio building that read: ‘Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the ...”

“... any science’ was, according to the Graves account, seen off without trouble by a single straight left. And in spite of his undoubted awe of, and need for, Laura Riding, he remained like a small boy wholly fascinated by himself, and with no time for other writers or poets such as Yeats – an obvious rival in magical charisma. The secret of his ...”

“... would have presented little problem to a marauding Zulu impi, unless that of throwing its assegais straight while doubled up with laughter. It is more plausible to take the scrum as the most explicit physical expression of the male bonding which Making Men sees at the heart of its subject. The opportunities which it gave for respectable touching (amplified by ...”

“... at that, now,’ her mother, a perfume magnate whose Protestant husband died nastily for Michael Collins, says of a cup of tea: ‘Strong enough to trot a mouse on.’ He amuses himself, also, by playing up the hero’s drink problem – Marlowe has to be helped into a taxi, passes out in his clothes, throws up – and having him grouse about his ...”

“... but her mother was determined she should attend a good secretarial college so that she could go ‘straight into a really high-class post’ – she began as a shorthand typist in a bank in Regent Street. In later life Johnson said that she never doubted ‘that I should have had a fine acting career, if migraines hadn’t stopped me’; this is characteristic ...”

“... more than others of the same size – appalled him.Scenes based on the Signal Hill meetings went straight into the manuscript of Oil! By June 1925, Sinclair was predicting it would be ‘the best thing I have ever done’. The story begins in 1912, when the oil-powered world was still in its infancy. We first encounter our protagonist, thirteen-year-old ...”

“... and drove him to fits of remorse. ‘I hope a letter is not too melodramatic,’ he writes to Michael and Edna Longley, after a perceived early failure to be an advocate for poetry in the North: ‘It is not so much in the hope of redressing any hurt as to allay my own embarrassment and guilt. As usual your attitude has been gracious and gentle in the ...”

“... opera, The Plumber’s Gift. David Malouf has devised a Kipling libretto, Baa Baa Black Sheep, for Michael Berkeley. Blake Morrison is, with the composer Gavin Bryars, engaged on an operatic version of Jules Verne’s story, ‘Dr Ox’s Experiment’. Gavin Ewart has provided saucy verses for Robin Holloway’s opera buffa about sexuality, Boys and Girls Come ...”

“... cheffed [stabbed] for nobody!’ – but was increasingly worried about his older half-brother, Michael, who had ‘been moving a bit mad recently’. Carl went to a community centre in Loughborough Junction where Thapar volunteered; he started getting into trouble after his father walked out, and was later expelled from school.As boys in these ...”

“... At the centre of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, in the second of its three tales, Cat, a black woman police investigator in New York, has the job of receiving and recording the calls of people threatening to blow themselves and others to pieces. Only because these deranged stories have become too familiar does she miss the one who really means it, a young boy, who, without forewarning or apparent motive, goes up to a stranger in Central Park, embraces him and explodes ...”