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“... It’s not just Victorian models that make The Casual Vacancy seem a bit thin and monochrome. Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers, published last year, also has a West Country setting (frankly Devonian), not to mention a self-consciously pretty town trying to set itself apart from a larger settlement nearby, disowning any connection with a hinterland ...”

“... is his daemon seems at home with its homelessness. ‘The Tree-House’, one of the better of the short poems in Cathures, has Morgan climbing into a tree-house, surveying the world below, then gazing at ‘the high, the uncapturable’ clouds. It’s a happy poem. But – sitting comfortably some way above the world and contemplating what’s higher still ...”

“... to Egypt, writing regularly for opposition newspapers. He published a novel, a novella and some short stories (collected in 2004 under the title Friendly Fire), none of which made much of an impression. Meanwhile, he practised as a dentist in Cairo. The stories his wealthy and influential patients told him while sitting in his chair became the basis of The ...”

“... procession is seditious, menacing, propelled by a wild music – part carnivalesque, part dirge (Philip Miller is the composer) – and by the moves of a jubilant dancer, in silhouette like the rest of the troupe. Elsewhere in the piece, we’re asked to think about time as if it weren’t the thing we experience. That’s not easy: just as ideas about the ...”

“... have mastered the intricacies of the Belgrano affair. Julian Haviland, Anthony Bevins and Philip Webster of the Times would all pass with first-class honours any finals examination in Belgrano Studies: but as members of the House of Commons Lobby, they necessarily have to give their attention to every ephemeral political event and could not devote ...”

“... they were unwittingly providing concepts so elastic that they could stretch to a thousand short-term excuses. Setbacks were thus reinterpreted as temporary aberrations or explained away in hindsight as necessary detours. The Left has thus been comforted through many a season of adversity by a perversely indomitable sense that, in the long run, history ...”

“... neither simply the writer himself nor a delegated fictional character but a kind of semi-fictional short-cut to an idea in the making. The essay, we might say, is the place where thoughts can have a hero – as distinct from novels, where heroes and others just have thoughts. When Musil says that Thomas Mann and others ‘write for people who are ...”

“... so much over anything not entirely uncritical written of Winston in World War Two (or WWW2 for short), there was no possibility whatever that Charmley’s 648 pages for 30 quid would pass by quietly, attracting deadly praise of ‘the best one-volume Churchill biography published this fortnight’ variety. Inevitably, the suggestion that post-1945 world ...”

“... with the German Jews but lived in ‘Little Odessa’. Marcus starred on the debate team and wrote short stories for the school magazine. He got good grades, was accepted at Yale, and seemed on the path to assimilation. But Yale was going through one of its periodic anti-Semitic paroxysms. ‘If we do not educate them, they will overrun us,’ warned the dean ...”

“... good movies out of the later list (for example, LA Confidential, The Usual Suspects, Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould), and a few others (Nil by Mouth, The English Patient, The Truman Show, Shallow Grave) that someone might feel it was worth crossing the road for; but in general his argument that Lane’s evident talent has had little to work on and ...”

“... off in an instant. A warrant for my execution was drafted at the moment of this conception.’ Short stories rely on parsimony and Perlman’s overwrought sentences don’t often work. The prose is better when he writes with more detachment. ‘In the Time of the Dinosaur’ offers a frosty, child’s-eye view of a superannuated father. Lucas wants to be a ...”

“... than a dozen speeches called the Philippics, after Demosthenes’ almost equally nasty attacks on Philip of Macedon, three centuries earlier. The chase had degenerated into an elaborate, occasionally comic game of hide-and-seek, with Cicero torn between holing up in his villa to wait for the inevitable knock on the door and making a speedy getaway by ...”

“... Off and on, for over half a century, William Gaddis worked on a manuscript about the short life of the player piano in the United States. Over fifty years on an outmoded entertainment? There is more here than meets the eye: ‘Agapē Agape is a satirical celebration of the conquest of technology and of the place of art and the artist in a technological democracy,’ Gaddis wrote in a proposal from the early 1960s ...”

“... of the sons and daughters, rather than that of the migrants themselves. From Henry Roth to Philip Roth, it’s the second or third generation whose experience shapes the fiction of immigration. Brooklyn is unusual in telling the story from the immigrant’s perspective, the more so since Tóibín’s protagonist is female, young, unattached and ...”

“... conceptual and not really catchy title, relaunched the Kundera backlist: The Joke (1967), the short story collection Laughable Loves (1969), The Farewell Party (1972), Life Is Elsewhere (1973), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979). If you weren’t reading the new book, you were catching up on one of the others, or feverishly waiting for the next ...”