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“... flies elsewhere, this book is thus interrupted.’ No doubt this is why the marvellous 500-page Charterhouse of Parma (1839) had to be written in just 52 days, during which time the author shut himself up, as if in a prison, accepting no visits, working non-stop. At the centre of that novel is a prison and a hero in love, so in love that he is happy to ...”

“... unit began firing standard steel balls into London telephone directories. According to the page at which a ball had stopped they could calculate how much energy it had lost when penetrating the target. They went from telephone books to human flesh, borrowing what Zuckerman called ‘anatomical material taken from, and returned to, a hospital ...”

“... so many Maigrets? Why did he go on writing them when he was already fabulously rich? In the final page of Letter to My Mother, he has a revelation: along with her implacable struggle for security his mother had always felt the need to be good, or to believe herself good. There was no point in winning and believing oneself bad. This was why she always had time ...”

“... Coetzee’s allegiance is to English as a literary language, something that exists on the page, or to English as an international lingua franca, something that exists everywhere and nowhere. The uneasiness, then, is Coetzee’s, in that ‘a local creolised English has little appeal’ to him. Eventually, the author elects ‘world culture over ...”

“... under the spell. ‘I was entranced,’ he tells us at once of his first reading of the 1500-page novel, and goes on:Nineteenth-century France … was uncommonly generous to the rest of the world … But among all the gifts France has given to Hollywood, Broadway and the common reader wherever she may be, Les Misérables stands out as the greatest by ...”

“... and never take out the trash. I look out my window at a funeral home.’ By the end of the second page – as is the case in so many American short stories – the long shadow of Raymond Carver has fallen unmistakably over the narrative. The narrator describes his unusual line of work and various grotesque experiences from his past in an apparently ...”

“... into any convention there may be for fiction about the Holocaust and the camps. On the very first page we meet in Gyuri an observant, detached, self-obsessed boy who notices all details with crystal precision, and yet has no interest in the motives of other people, or in the background to what is taking place, unless they impact on his own hour-to-hour ...”

“... of an irreversible transformation in his party that has set it firmly back on the road to power. Tim Bale’s exhaustive and authoritative account is hedged throughout with academic caution, but it concludes in terms that treat the Conservatives’ return to office as a foregone conclusion: ‘just as was the case for Margaret Thatcher, Cameron will ...”

“... in a copy of The Descrypcyon of Englonde (1502) held by the Society of Antiquaries in London. Page after page of this history of Britain is covered with blocks of black ink that delete, or nearly delete, every appearance of the word ‘pope’, from Peter the First on. The deletions are meticulous and they read like ...”

“... treated so gently.’ It would take only two hundred years for this earth to be pounded into dust. Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths are among Australia’s most creative historians. Griffiths’s Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (1996) has become the most quoted work of Australian history in new research, and Bonyhady’s The ...”

“... his name, doesn’t play a significant role,’ Santagata writes. However, the Dante on the page is subtly transformed from the Dante seeking to overcome the limitations of a modest background. There’s no hint of criticism here. Santagata isn’t arguing that Dante is a lesser poet than we thought, or in any way disreputable. But he’s not in the ...”

“... The Christodora​ of Tim Murphy’s novel is a New York apartment building, ‘handsomely simple’, built on the corner of Avenue B and 9th Street in the 1920s. By the 1980s the area had become known as the East Village, and the building had come down in the world. After a fire it was refurbished and turned into a condominium, in which Steven Traum, an urban planner, bought an apartment, using it as office space while he continued to live on the Upper East Side ...”

“... the world knows more about Southey than Lynda Pratt, and she and her team of editors, principally Tim Fulford and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, have done an exemplary job recording variants, printing early versions and manuscript fragments, and identifying sources. Southey’s ambitions were vast, and he set about achieving them with precocious efficiency. While ...”

“... pages. Then the torment begins, and we’re not even halfway through. From now on each turn of the page will expose the reader to greater unhappiness. There’s a moment in The Return of the Native where the main character, Clym, already deeply troubled by his mother’s mysterious death, goes out of his way to find a little boy who may be able to tell him ...”

“... As the subtitle indicates, as the author tells us on the first page, and as he reminds us in the last chapter, ‘a simple question’ states the theme and explains the origin of Jeremy Paxman’s book: Who runs Britain? There are fitful efforts to generate a sense of mystery about the answer. Thus at the outset ‘the only serious answer’ is mooted in terms which invite suspicion that we might be in for a counter-intuitive disclosure later: ‘Exaggerated though her influence might be, the hand of Britain’s first female prime minister was seen behind everything from the management of industry to the appointment of professors ...”