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“... David Vann’s novel – his debut, after a short story collection, Legend of a Suicide (2008), and a memoir, A Mile Down (2005) – is a book that makes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road read like a walk in the park. Compared to Caribou Island, The Road is grim-lit lite ...”

“... woodworker: his friends, among them a city official with a record book and a priest, insisted so strongly that he was someone else that he finally agreed, only for his friends to return him to his previous name. Our identification, Groebner suggests, depends on what others say of us. But he goes on to describe the marks and signs people used to identify ...”

“... to imagine Clement Attlee, the most effective champion of ordinary working people in Labour’s history, thriving in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Not only was he a conventional public school product – enormously proud of his Haileybury connection – and an unquestioning British patriot of military mien and ...”

“... twice on that occasion, first against the denationalisation of road haulage by Mr Churchill’s Cabinet and then in a sharp attack on the hypocrisy of the Bevanites, who had swept to victory in the previous day’s NEC elections. It was a bitter, ugly and exhausting Conference. Herbert Morrison and Hugh Dalton, who had ...”

“... and psycho-philosophical pronouncements floating about in it. Stanford White is the author’s great-grandfather. He was a glamorous turn-of-the-century architect in New York, very sought after in his time and still admired today; though most famous, perhaps, for his death. In 1906 he was shot dead while watching a performance of Mam’zelle Champagne at ...”

“... However, the suggestion, and perhaps even the expectation, on the part of Professor Tindall’s publishers, that students might need help in reading and comprehending his mammoth work gives pause for thought. Thus the publishers in question recommend that students – and one assumes they have American students in mind – acquire Thomas S. Morgan’...”

“... to the American air strike on Tripoli and Ben Ghazi, two days before, and to the Prime Minister’s decision – with the minimum of Cabinet consultation – to play the part of an ally by sanctioning the use for that purpose of bases in Britain. The best of the debate justified Mr Healey’s words of praise, and those of ...”

“... parts of England are becoming almost as lonesome as the African veld.’ This was Rider Haggard’s conclusion after two years’ gruelling travel across the farming counties of England in 1901 and 1902. Only the odd Irish tinker trudged the dusty roads. Thistles and rushes invaded the untilled fields. The impression of desolation prompted Haggard to quote ...”

“... and white?’ was a question I asked my mother once. Until that moment her memories of childhood, so much more engrossing than any bedtime story, had unspooled in my head in perfect greyscale. (They do still, in childish defiance of the facts.) It wasn’t as if I’d seen many photographs of her as a girl – I still haven’t – but simply that the ...”

“... Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in ...”

“... The first impression​ of Lucie Rie’s work is of circles. Spirals, rings and discs characterised her ceramics from the beginning and although the exhibition at Kettle’s Yard (until 25 June) is arranged, with admirable clarity, in a chronological sequence, that too suggests a circularity, themes revisited and variations played out over time ...”

“... outside the small Ukrainian town of Mostyska, squinting at a transliteration of the Mourner’s Kaddish on my phone. A local farmer had directed my guide towards a couple of stubs of rock, the only remnants of dozens of gravestones that had long ago been removed for use as building materials. Brown hens pecked at the ...”

“... and posters, fire engines and other Yes-mobiles.’ In the middle of the coalition government’s austerity programme, the ‘Yes’ campaign promised a country free from Tory policies and Tory prime ministers. The Conservatives lost all of their Scottish seats when Labour won at Westminster in 1997, regaining one in 2001. They still had only that single ...”

“... after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the factional ...”

“... Kate Moss done up as Ziggy Stardust. The picture is a monument to improbable staying power. It’s more than two decades since Moss was photographed by Corinne Day for the Face, those instantly iconic black and white images of a skinny 16-year-old on Camber Sands, wearing no make-up and very few clothes, grinning through her freckles and pointy teeth, all at ...”