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“... and rhetorical flourishes, including prolepsis, analepsis and litotes. A posting sends us to Henry IV Part 2, Act 2, Scene 2, where Prince Hal remarks to his low-life companion Poins: ‘What a disgrace is it to me to remember thy name, or to know thy face tomorrow.’ (Another contribution boldly proposes that, since fever makes us shake, the first ...”

“... the first time in thirty years he wouldn’t be going to the show. The culture minister, Claudia Roth, promised more state control. Finally, on 16 July, Documenta’s director, Sabine Schormann, resigned by ‘mutual agreement’ with the supervisory board.When I visited, the weekend after the opening, the vast exhibition, spread across thirty-odd ...”

“... Negative Space (Bloodaxe, £12). Earlier Lleshanaku poems were done by the pioneering Henry Israeli and perhaps a dozen other translators. The new book is translated by Ani Gjika, an Albanian-born American poet, who is ideally placed to traffic between the land of her birth and her adopted homeland, the way Charles Simic has done since the 1960s ...”

“... of the power of the Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne Gospels or the artists’ books of Dieter Roth or Ed Ruscha is precisely that they raise and then refuse a distinction between literary and material form.When Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BCE, the flames that swept through Ashurbanipal’s library baked the clay tablets harder, causing them to be ...”

“... art: ‘plastic art’, ‘plastic merit’ and ‘plastic beauty’ were high compliments. Henry James, describing an aesthete, notes that ‘his appreciation ... was based partly on his fine sense of the plastic.’ Yet a hundred years after Baudelaire the figurative meaning of ‘plastic’ had fallen; it was now nearly synonymous with words like ...”

“... life? ‘I knew from the start that I was out for Glory,’ he wrote in that essay. ‘Unlike Henry Adams’ – the writer Vidal fondly compares his own work to – ‘I got out at 17, and vowed that if I was not elected to anything, I would not come back to live in the capital when there were so many other worlds and glories elsewhere.’ He hasn’t ...”

“... there are two books in Bridget’s father’s flat: an old Private Eye annual and the complete Henry Root letters, both gathering dust on the bathroom windowsill. Regardless, he insists he’s a reader and buys a copy of The Satanic Verses which he pretends to concentrate on: his conception of this activity ‘involved bunching his eyebrows and letting his ...”

“... remember when he had last reread the novel.WritersI heard, from separate sources, that both Philip Roth and William Styron had pinned up above their desks a famous Flaubert aphorism, which Blake Bailey quotes in his Roth biography: ‘Be orderly and regular in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be wild and original ...”

“... Samuel Beckett; Chris Morris in Blue Jam; and perhaps most vividly of all, Vivian Stanshall in Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. In fact, A Humument is a novel of quotation: not only in the sense that all of its words were written first by Mallock (although not, as Eric Morecambe said of the notes in his piano playing, necessarily in the right order); but also ...”

“... sound very funny today: ‘Happy birthday, Tu Yu’ etc.) His new lodestars were Proust and Henry Green. In the month after he graduated, the New Yorker accepted a handful of his light verse as well as a short story, and offered him a job on his return from England. He spent 19 months reporting Talk of the Town pieces, then quit the city, with Mary and ...”

“... American writers who prefer the national mannerism of the barbaric yawp. Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Rush are exact contemporaries, born in 1933. McCarthy excels at antique dialogue and rapturous word-pictures of frontier landscapes; likes to portray violence; won’t represent thought; can’t do women; and has denounced ...”

“... from every corner of the earth. The very best ironies live their lives inside other ironies. Henry VIII changed his relationship with the Catholic Church so as to enable himself to marry his chosen bride. (Sadly, something happened to her.) Five hundred years later, Prince Charles changes the date of his wedding to his chosen bride so as to attend the ...”

“... he pours scorn on it – too stridently, he now confesses – in an essay on Orwell and Henry Miller called ‘Outside the Whale’. Arnold visits the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse and contemplates it through the lens of his famous melancholy. The new world powerless to be born was that foreseen in the heroic but failed efforts of the Romantic ...”

“... He has always had a sizeable Anglophone readership, especially in America, where novelists from Henry Miller (‘I don’t care whether he’s a Fascist … he can write’) to Kurt Vonnegut (‘every writer is in his debt’) to Philip Roth (‘Céline is my Proust!’) have declared their loyalty to his radical ...”

“... through the adult narrator’s ability to interpret the nature of that knowing to the reader. Henry James offers a master-class in point-of-view in his preface to the novel: I should have of course to suppose for my heroine dispositions originally promising, but above all I should have to invest her with perceptions easily and almost infinitely ...”