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“... met annually with editors to describe what he was working on – is the central challenge faced by Thomas Kunkel in his new life of the writer, Man in Profile. Kunkel found references to several possible projects: a big New York novel in the manner of James Joyce whom Mitchell admired above all other moderns; a life and times of a smart and funny woman who ...”

“... public!” is the inevitable reflection at the end of one’s life.’ But there is, necessarily, more to Hardy than this, and he was always torn between the impulse to concealment (and even dissimulation) and the impulse to self-exposure. He can alternately repel the reader, as he might have warned a trespasser out of the grounds of Max Gate, and shock or ...”

“... Mauss, Evans-Pritchard or Weber, have all been obsessed by these issues, which they connect more or less closely with the very origins of our own society. Here the origins of social science and the origins of modern society are traced to the same source. Stolen Lightning is much more an examination of these great ...”

“... Some fictional characters are easier to imagine being than others, either because they’re more like us (‘we’ being whoever’s doing the imagining, whether readers or writers), or because they’re more like characters familiar from other stories. Agu, the narrator of Beasts of No Nation, Uzodinma Iweala’s short, intense and ambitious first novel, is a rebel soldier in a civil war in an anonymous African country ...”

“... was part of the war effort.”’ Despite this flash of hostility, she kisses him. But he wants more than kisses. ‘I wish I had something to remember you by,’ he says, and starts fumbling with her clothes. She tries to stop him; he rapes her; she headbutts him; he runs away. The next day, ‘the morning after the invasion’ of Occupied Europe, but also ...”

“... the helicopter that would take her back to Berlin was it evident that this was a politician of more than local standing. No mention had been made of the coming election, much less any challenger. When the German media complains that Merkel doesn’t bother to campaign, she makes a face, as if to say: ‘Why would I?’The centre isn’t merely holding in ...”

“... Norfolk and Norwich Hospital ‘in a state of almost total immobility’. We might like to know more about his condition (the reference to Gregor Samsa and his little legs doesn’t help much), its diagnosis and how it was treated. But Sebald prefers to let other people, other events and objects, speak for him. An exquisite sound picture of two night nurses ...”

“... The​ posthumous progress in English of the Austrian writer Thomas 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 English never exactly sold), and the translator herself of the posthumous My Prizes, in an exquisitely bound volume from Notting Hill Editions, with a justly amused introduction by Frances Wilson: ‘Few writers have received more applause than Thomas Bernhard, Austrian novelist, playwright and enfant terrible, and few have bitten more sharply the hand that clapped ...”

“... give it to the museums on the chin’) – irresistible to those who like me, twenty years and more ago, had heard Cuban schoolgirls shouting to the same measure: Fidel, Fidel, a los Yanquis darle duro. A month later, there was another, smaller parade, organised by some of the country’s leading artists in Santo Domingo square, demonstrating in favour of ...”

“... in an anonymous town somewhere in America, is also endlessly distracted from the game by the even more intractable problems of the rest of his life: his dead-end job manning the phones at a third-rate pizza joint, his shaky relationship with his girlfriend, the antics of his unstable friends. All this mundane, irrelevant stuff makes its way into the ...”

“... Ihave​ a theory – more of a hunch, really – that to be a real football fan you have to commit to a team by the age of six, or eight at the latest. Unlike my friends whose fathers took them to watch Aldershot’s Fourth Division tussles on Saturday afternoons, I don’t remember watching a football match before the 1986 Mexico World Cup, when I was already nine and a half ...”

“... family betrayal: at first of the inheritance of the broad-church Anglicanism of his famous father, Thomas Arnold; and then – not once, but twice – in the danger to his marriage to Julia, the anti-Catholic he had married in New Zealand. Bernard Bergonzi’s description of Thomas Arnold the Younger as a ‘Victorian ...”

“... biographies of his pictorial style. Charles Hope’s book, although in scope and ambition much more restricted than Crowe’s and Cavalcaselle’s, marks in this respect a most welcome change. It is the first truly informative account of Titian’s life published in English in recent years, based as it is on the author’s vast knowledge of previously ...”

“... through these palaces, staring at the gold cups and the silver bowls, which are not even used any more. Then they go to a sort of market inside the palace and buy pictures of these things, or miniature versions of them that are not real silver and gold.’ These criticisms are too laboured and sneering to have much force. I assume they are intended to reveal ...”

“... constitution came into force in January 1948. The Movimento Sociale Italiano had been established more than a year earlier under the leadership of Giorgio Almirante, Mussolini’s culture minister in the Nazi puppet state established in northern Italy in September 1943. By the end of the 1950s, the anti-fascist consensus of the immediate postwar period had ...”