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“... to his native state, and to begin a redemptory, wiser, more purposeful life. But Baumgartner, poor Hugo Baumgartner, a master-loser, a comprehensively world-losing wandering Jew, will never find his way home, home to Berlin and Gemütlichkeit and his sweet, sad Mutti. Baumgartner is inescapably a denizen (the only word that fits) of Bombay, and how he comes to ...”

“... here is focused where the observing Deronda’s (which is in fact hers) is – on the beautiful, young, reckless and proud Gwendolen and the fate she is defying. But it was not in the plan of the novelist as elaborator of plots to actualise what we must see as the felicitous potentiality. I might have said that George Eliot, the great genius, having begun ...”

“... a gay LA eaterie, all waiters are dressed as cops and the maitre d’ as a police lieutenant. One young gay took the law enforcement fantasy to its natural conclusion and seduced a speed-cop into chasing him down the freeway. He refused to stop and the cop opened fire. When the wreckage was examined, it seemed the offender had come a moment before the bullet ...”

“... One of the children, an almost-four-year-old who is still being breastfed, starts acting up: Hugo cries when no one wants to watch his Pinocchio DVD; he smashes a new video-game remote; he refuses to go out in a game of cricket. When he raises the cricket bat to strike an older child, the other boy’s father leaps between them, lifts him up off the ...”

“... Hugo Hamilton was born in 1953 to an Irish father and a German mother. When he was growing up, as he writes in this remarkable memoir, he spent a lot of time trying to prove that he wasn’t a Nazi. But he never could. The sight of somebody in lederhosen and an Aran sweater was irresistible to the local bullies. Later, his peers at the prestigious Coláiste Mhuire were just as intolerant ...”

“... under Heath and Thatcher and was the defence secretary during the Falklands War. Her husband, Hugo Swire, once a director of Sotheby’s, became MP for East Devon in 2001 and a minister of state for Northern Ireland in the coalition government in 2010, retiring from politics after the election last year. Swire was a journalist before her marriage, but ...”

“... justice?’ The first person to be arrested, three days after the killing, was Carlos Vielman, a young homeless alcoholic. Investigators claimed he was the shirtless man who had been spotted fleeing the scene of the crime by his fellow rough sleeper Rubén Chanax. Chanax failed to pick him out of an identity parade, however. Vielman also had a solid ...”

“... does the Anglo-Saxon imagination build, when it contemplates the tropics, quand it fait chaud. The young Cabrera Infante read Carmen in an abridged edition when he was 12, and confesses to peeping through windows of Cuban cigar factories ever since. Jean Stubbs went to Cuba in 1968 to survey the same scene, motivated by an interest in Latin American labour in ...”

“... eyes open and their pupils erased. In the second section, set in 1991, a cad and a bounder called Hugo Lamb – Mitchell likes writing about cads – shags and cheats his way through his Cambridge days, before encountering first Holly Sykes and then a shadowy group of immortals. In the third, set in 2004, a war reporter – the father of Holly’s child ...”

“... to the house on the west coast where she has spent much of her childhood. It is the residence of Hugo Pierce, the celebrated novelist. But Hugo has just been found dead in the neighbouring woods, and Minnie is needed to stand by and help Moura his widow. There are two sons, Gareth and Philip, both gone to America. Years ...”

“... It is a curious thing that of the three judges offering superlatives on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is English. And yet Williams, born in Windsor during World War Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a lifelong London resident, seems as English as they come ...”

“... Raban fetches up amid the small, insular community of Guntersville, Alabama, where he meets a young motel-owner called Tim. Tim is writing a novel. Raban is consulted for a professional opinion of the work in progress, and with commendable grace he identifies the strengths of this driven ‘kitchen-table writer’. But he also highlights the central ...”

“... close in on the events and people and things that have nearly touched him nearly: the death of a young subaltern in the war, an adulterous affair with his sister-in-law and with many others, a painting, an unsuccessfully defended murderer – but usually, death. He is a man who has devoted himself to shrinking feeling to the point where the renunciation of a ...”

“... memoirs and numberless newspaper articles – probably running to more than 300 titles. As Charles Hugo put it, ‘everyone has read Dumas, but nobody has read everything of Dumas’s, not even Dumas himself.’ It is well-authenticated that some works which appear under the name of Dumas were not written by him at all, and certain of his rivals even attempted ...”

“... Arabella. These, I would say, constitute half a safety-net, half a ball and chain, meaning that Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) won’t ever go away. All the same, when one thinks of him in English, he’s nothing like the author of a yellow ten-volume set of works that he is in German – five of plays, three of essays and talks, one apiece of poems and ...”