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“... watching eyes, and her face and head, resting on the table, watching us watching her, fading to black’. The film we have been seeing through these two hundred pages of Dyer’s memory and prose is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), a science fiction movie that doesn’t so much transcend the genre as pervert it, turn it over to the history of religion ...”

“... corner. A group of even younger kids is scolded for just hanging around. A sweet-looking young black man helps his little brother with his homework before he goes out to drop a gun down a drain – the weapon he used for a small piece of housekeeping on a character we can scarcely remember. Close to the end of Season Five the montage simply shows the city ...”

“... for the first time, the narrator gets a word in. ‘She wore a strapless gown and slippers of black velvet. Her bare insteps were as white as her young shoulders.’ But then we’re off into Flora’s perspective again: ‘The party seemed to have degenerated into a lot of sober eyes staring at her with nasty compassion from every corner, every cushion ...”

“... handful of other writers who, I feel, might have given us something like Gayev’s ‘I pot the black’ in The Cherry Orchard. (Apparently, Swedish critics found fault with Söderberg for his ‘digressions’ and ‘collages’, and he remained un-understood for some considerable time.) The consultation includes a bizarrely wonderful – and again ...”

“... after the Quartet: poems, plays, a book about Cyprus, other novels. T.S. Eliot greatly admired The Black Book, and two early novels, Pied Piper of Lovers and Panic Spring, have recently been reissued by ELS, a Canadian press. Still, so much of Durrell’s reputation rests, or fails to rest, on the Quartet that this does seem a good place to start one’s ...”

“... Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm … I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market.’ When the voice says, ‘Of course a situation like that does tempt amateurs,’ the screen shows us a corpse floating in dirty water, and we are prepared for the voice’s readiness to take wreckage as a kind of norm: ‘Vienna doesn’t really ...”

“... Dostoevsky also figures prominently in Kristeva’s book about ‘depression and melancholy’, Black Sun (1987), which includes a long quotation from The Idiot as a prelude to a chapter on Holbein’s painting of the dead Christ, and a whole chapter devoted to Dostoevsky’s ideas of suffering and pardon. ‘Pardon,’ Kristeva memorably says, ‘renews ...”

“... and never wanted to see another book after that.’ All I can say is, he deserved his black and white tiles. He has both autonomy and tact. His translation is full of character, marvellously pointed but in touch with timelessness, relished but without striving for effect. We are in the world of Briggflatts, of Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘The Great ...”

“... athletic shoe industry, and the fashion industry as a whole, traffics in images. A Nike as depicts Michael Jordan as a corporate CEO who takes time in between games to inspect the shoes bearing his name. The figures of athletes and supermodels flash everywhere. ‘Because beauty has something to say,’ is how Esquire announced its Christy Turlington cover, as ...”

“... There is also one Michael Agnolo from Caravaggio who is doing marvellous things in Rome ... He thinks little of the works of other masters ... All works of art he believes to be ‘Bagatelli’, child’s play, whoever by, and whatever of, unless they are made from life, and that there is no better course than to follow Nature ...”

“... the baker’s wife, Rosina Zoft, allows Katharina to use her bread oven from time to time; Michael Stahl, who owns a shed, lets her store her grain there; when she needs fresh milk, neighbours supply it. She, in turn, dispenses homemade herbal remedies, lends money and makes gifts of food and wine. Resentments arise when too little or too much is ...”

“... in this, and indeed any biography – its author. As Gordon Craig transformed theatre design, so Michael Holroyd in 1967 revolutionised the writing of biography with Lytton Strachey, which extended the biographer’s reach from the public to the private, from the work to the man, from the study to the bedroom. In doing so, he breached the border between the ...”

“... of his novel, leading us back from impending departure into the events of the previous year. Michael is an unprepossessing family man. He takes what he likes and abuses the rest, which is sometimes his wife. When her pregnancy entered its advanced stages, she became useless, no longer pleasurable, and he left her for the consolations of his ...”

“... The aim of SOE was to organise sabotage and revolt in occupied Europe, with the help of ‘black’ propaganda. Momentarily, perhaps, Dalton saw himself as another Lenin, lighting the touchpaper of an international socialist revolution. But again the results were disappointing. Instead of setting Europe ablaze, Dalton ended up fighting an epic ...”

“... when he says, in his closing sentences, that we ‘can’t say what it’s like to actually be a black-tailed rattlesnake, much less a little ridgenose’ (why that ‘much less’? How can he tell?) But, the personalities of different species – another remarkable feature of their diversity – are nicely displayed. When he describes coral snakes as ...”