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“... words​ , reminiscent of W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’, come from Theodor Wonja Michael’s autobiography, Deutsch sein und Schwarz dazu: Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen (2013), translated into English as Black German: An Afro-German Life in the 20th Century. Born in Berlin in 1925, Michael was the ...”

“... Diminutive but perfectly formed’ was the phrase coined by Private Eye to describe Sir Michael Edwardes. It stuck because it caught the mechanical, wind-up, less-than-life quality of the man who ‘turned British Leyland round’ To me he was always a character out of Thunderbirds, the television series in which assorted automata glide round the globe, programmed to mouth platitudes and do down the much more human baddies ...”

“... dreary and clothy sprog of the electric 1880s; this un-Austrian Austrian and un-Jewish Jew (Joseph Roth – who has certainly spoiled me for Zweig – was both, to the max); not a pacifist much less an activist but a passivist; this professional adorer, schmoozer, inheritor and collector, owner of Beethoven’s desk and Goethe’s pen and Leonardo and ...”

“... two pages devoted to its royal house, which is rather modest considering that His Majesty King Michael I of Romania serves as Chairman of the Comité de Patronage of the Société des Amis de I’Almanach de Gotha 1998. From these pages I learn that Michael or Mihai was born to King Carol in 1921 and ...”

“... that are wall-to-wall English-language originals. Chatto – home of Chekhov, Proust and Joseph Roth – recently went through three or four seasons without any translations at all. Obviously, publishing isn’t what it was, the bottom line has risen inexorably, there were all the huge and much-bruited takeovers and mergers and acquisitions, but ...”

“... Rain in Macondo’ and One Hundred Years of Solitude). Garcia Marquez’s case is not like that of Joseph Heller, for example, in which the dominance of one work, and the tendency of the rest to be seen as pedestals, buttresses and exit ramps, is adventitious. And the connections inside his fiction need to be grasped – more than the recurrences in ...”

“... The UVF car bombs in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974. ‘The fucking Brother from Tipperary.’ Father Joseph Byrne and Father Thaddeus Matthews. Lee-Enfield and Remington. Bruch’s Kol Nidrei cello concerto. And always June, June, June. Courtship, holidays on the Isle of Man, life. Things long dissolved in him crystallise, and of course vice versa. For such a ...”

“... as Carson puts it on the back cover, ‘a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night’. She adds: ‘The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them wrong.’ They are not formally linked but interesting connections among them can be found ...”

“... few careers are the problems and opportunities of life as a botanist more visible than in that of Joseph Dalton Hooker. Hooker, who was born in 1817, was bred to the botanical purple: his father, Sir William Jackson Hooker, was Regius Professor of Botany at Glasgow University, and, later, the first full-time director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, a ...”

“... them as too bizarre even for his own freely imaginative fiction. The memory of the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick (Treves always called him John, but he was wrong), was largely lost until 1923, when Sir Frederick, as he had by then become, a distinguished surgeon laden with professional and public honours, revived it in an essay subsequently reprinted by ...”

“... no acclaimed senescence! All this, then, inevitably further confounded by translation, because, as Joseph Brodsky put it, ‘a translation, by definition, lags behind the original work.’Take​ Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, seemingly one of Hrabal’s most experimental works: a single sentence filling a short book, a monologue, or rather a speech ...”

“... years were a disaster. This is what first bound together Ranelagh’s galère, ranging from Keith Joseph to Alan Walters, from Alfred Sherman to Denis Thatcher: the Institute of Economic Affairs competing the while with Enoch Powell for the role of the enduring spiritual godfather whose time had come. Ranelagh’s book is badly organised. Having begun as an ...”

“... with a Minimalist sensitivity to space – as any of the artists.In 1994 Wright made way for Michael Govan, a protégé of Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim Museum. By this time, Dia had acquired nearly seven hundred works, and to show this collection needed more space than the real-estate market in Manhattan would allow. From a plane above ...”

“... Life,​ for the narrators of Joseph O’Neill’s five novels, is experienced as a series of reversals as unexpected as they are humiliating. James Jones, the protagonist of This Is the Life (1991), once served as a pupil barrister to celebrity QC Michael Donovan. He had thought he was in line for a position at the chambers, but was overlooked at the end of the pupillage ...”

“... fiction.’ It is in this mode that we hear, in Inner Workings, of Italo Svevo, Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth, W.G. Sebald. The method is less biographical for Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, Nadine Gordimer and others, and a long, frosty essay on Walter Benjamin engages crucial concepts thoroughly and ends in a magnificent, if ambiguous tribute: ‘From a ...”