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“... Is the Japanese Prime Minister, Nakasone Yasuhiro, a racist? Or must we read his recent remarks about the superior intelligence of a monoracial society like Japan, and unlike the United States, in context, as his defenders claim? If so, in what context? The physical context was a seminar for the Japanese equivalent of the Young Conservatives ...”

“... forces a card – so that we can see how it feels to share it, if only for as long as it takes to read the hook. The same expectation holds good when a novelist proposes, as Gordon Burn does in his new novel Fullalove, that not green cheese or God’s love but black pus – meaningless suffering, and an appetite for meaningless suffering – is the basic ...”

“... legends rather than the brutality of facts. For ‘facts’, however, we must doubtless read ‘representations’. These representations, in modern times, have been overwhelmingly photographic in nature. Even the literary and narrative arts have (as is well-known) been transformed by cinematic techniques. Storytelling is shot through with notions ...”

“... or so before he wrote his tale of the actor-turned-mendicant, Neville St Clair, Doyle would have read the Elephant Man’s brief obituary in the Times. If he was tempted to use some of the facts in the case – the man’s never appearing in public unless concealed by a curtain-like mask with a single slit, a hat the circumference of his waist, and a huge ...”

“... the name. The novel was finished in 1969 and was published in America in 1974, translated by Peter Kussi, who has now revised his translation. The provisional title referred to the lifespan of Jaromil, who dies young, as lyric poets will, but also to the enforced, mass-produced, writer-proclaimed revolutionary ardours which ensued in 1948. At the ...”

“... of history, which Brooks is inclined still to underwrite. To apply this to Jeanneret, one must read his Wanderjahre as singularly purposeful: as though he went to Paris on his next journey after Vienna just to find out about concrete construction with Auguste Perret, or afterwards to Berlin to take lessons in the dignity of industrial design from ...”

“... scholars and diplomats who both spoke Tibetan, and two Austrian mountaineers, Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, who landed there for several years after escaping from British internment in India during World War Two. For most visitors, though, as Barnett observes, contact with Lhasa’s inhabitants was slight, the language barrier was high and, in ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography is as much a history of characterisations of the city as a history of London itself. And although Ackroyd is most concerned with character in the sense of ‘a personality invested with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a novelist or dramatist’, readers of his previous writings will not be surprised to hear that many other meanings of the word also come into play – ‘distinctive features’, ‘essential peculiarity’, ‘nature, style’, certainly; but also ‘distinctive mark, evidence, or token’; ‘a cipher for secret correspondence’; and even ‘a cabbalistic or magical sign or emblem ...”

“... exhibition (until 25 January), I wandered into the café to take the weight off my feet and to read the reviews I had downloaded from the exhibition website on my tablet. I had been careful not to read them until after my visit, but now I wanted to see if I could use them to get me started on my own review. The first one ...”

“... have never met Skelton, but I know some of the people in her book who have and who, what’s more, read the London Review of Books. This is inhibiting: like reviewing a paper on DNA for Nature when one has never encountered a double helix. Still, I do have one thing in common with Skelton. She says that Erich von Stroheim was her ideal. Mine too, and what is ...”

“... Russian novelists, the only things that have ever really caught on – when there is so much to be read in English? Increasingly, it’s only English that counts, not only in England and other English-speaking territories, but globally. Scores of English books get translated every year into every language under the sun – thereby wrecking the indigenous ...”

“... 2000 that he or she start with Militant, to get properly into the mood. It is a compellingly good read, and what is more, as far as one can tell, a model of fair and unbiased reporting. The weightier volume, with its tables and statistics and psephological analyses, will be for the long days in the library that follow. It is sobering to realise that that ...”

“... acquaintances and witnesses. Presumably the statements were taped and then edited. They all read fluently and they all read the same, except for one or two by inmates of Rikers Island which are dubbed into a kind of prison-movie vernacular. Some of the respondents have sensibly chosen to have pseudonyms. The rest are ...”

“... want to be enigmatic for?’ Or words to that effect. The question kept coming into my head as I read Beryl Bainbridge’s new novel, which is set on the Titanic during the four days before she sank, and narrated in the first person by a survivor whose first and only name is Morgan. The title, Every Man for Himself, suggests that human selfishness is going ...”

“... and imperishable, which one might label “God”.’ This tilt makes the book a curious one to read for much of the time, at least for this reader, inclined to believe that the supposed deep question is not a question at all, but an imposing phantom cast up by certain habits of mind. Holt quotes plenty of people who feel this way; he knows that worrying ...”