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“... researched, gruesome detail and ‘period’ dialogue; love affairs across ethnic boundaries). Philip Hensher amusingly panned that book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), which was set on a Dutch trading post in Nagasaki Bay in 1799, as ‘an exotically situated romance of astounding vulgarity’. Hensher took issue with its ...”

“... Circle, resuming the story in the late 1990s.’ The Closed Circle is either going to be a very short book, or Patrick is going to have to pep up a bit. Coe’s fastenings and fixings are not often so ugly and obvious – so butt-hinged – but his plots are often of such a complexity as to require a preface, explanatory acknowledgment or appendix. The ...”

“... been happy, and whose literary ambitions have been trivialised. First, she insists, ‘Austen’s short life may have been lived in relative privacy, but her novels show her to be a citizen, and certainly a spectator, of a far wider world.’ Second, and more controversially, she argues that ‘the true subject of serious fiction is not “current ...”

“... Big beautiful eyes, good bones, a serious nose, a large, modern mouth and a figure to die for. Short though. A pocket Venus, they called her, barely five feet tall. But, according to Tim Heald, her latest biographer, who has previously committed to paper the lives of Brian Johnston,2 Denis Compton,3 Barbara Cartland4 and Prince ...”

“... One day a long while ago Philip Larkin dropped a remark in passing about the difficulties of his current private life. He made it in the form of a jokey generalisation about the impossibility of relations between men and women, and added that the women ought really to marry each other, but that would be wrong, wouldn’t it? I forgot the remark for over thirty years until I bumped into it as an observation by one of the characters in Kingsley Amis’s latest novel, Difficulties with girls ...”

“... by special studies of anonymous or bestselling authors now suitable for academic recovery, Philip Fisher’s Still the New World marks a return in some ways to an older and less suspicious idea of ‘classic American literature’. Fisher is a critic who has written extensively on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on ...”

“... quality of each individual voice, including its timbre and its distinct registers’. He devoted a short chapter to a rapturous description of the quality of emotion in the singing of the castrato Velluti. In Feldman’s version of things, the castrato had no interest in being figuratively or really female, but rather was ‘decidedly male’. In a rather ...”

“... lengthy biographies in English. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s is the longest, having overtaken Philip Short’s Mao (1999) and Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1995). It represents an extraordinary research effort. The authors have been working on the project since at least 1986, to judge by the date of the earliest interview ...”

“... precisely how permanent collective wills are formed, and how such wills set themselves concrete short and long-term ends – i.e. a line of collective action. Gramsci Nobel Prize-winners seem to fall into two categories: those whom the prize honours, and those who honour the prize. And then there are those assumed to be in the first category, who turn out ...”

“... to look at Hungarian Book Week. The Budapest Daily News, which I pick up on the plane, carries a short preview of the event: a record 112 new titles are to be published for this year’s festival, with a total printing of three and a quarter million copies. The books are on average less expensive than last year. Among the titles expected to be in particular ...”

“... Auden​ loved aphorisms, extracts, notes, lists. It was not just the shortness of short forms that he approved of: he liked their refusal of system even more, their acknowledgment that fragmentariness can only ever be papered over, never wholly subsumed. The nearest he came to publishing an autobiography, which was not very near at all, was A Certain World (1970), a commonplace book made up of his favourite quotations, arranged alphabetically under rough and ready, almost arbitrary headings, with only occasional passages of explanation or commentary ...”

“... trying to jumble the messages in each session by means of a long, randomised key, one could send a short key allowing a message scrambled by a machine to be unscrambled. The process could be made to work by equipping both sender and receiver with identical machines and codebooks of keys, each good for one day, say. The sender would transmit a ...”

“... became as famous as any American writer of his generation, and for the last twenty years of his short life bragged about the ‘big book’ – his Recherche du Temps Perdu – which would reserve a seat at the grown-up table of literature. Scattered chapters were published in which few saw greatness, but that book seems to have been hopelessly unfinished ...”

“... Written in elaborate, distended sentences, Purple America is Moody’s most ambitious book. Like Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, it concerns a homicidal stutterer in the suburbs. Roth’s subject was a teenage girl who becomes a politically enraged terrorist. Moody’s quarry belongs to another breed: the hero of Purple America is named Hex ...”

“... but hubristic might be a more fitting epithet. It is not so much one big novel as a collection of short-winded novellas, each with a beginning and an end, but not much of a middle. All the postmodern trickery in the world can’t disguise the fact that Cloud Atlas is, like a matrioshka, hollow at its core. So the narrowing of focus in Mitchell’s new novel ...”