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“... screams said to have been heard down the street. I still have the bed, the polish at the foot of it scraped and scratched by my mother’s feet during the initial stages of that reluctant arrival. Had mine been a difficult birth, the persistence with which untoward events occur on and around my birthday would, though I am no believer in ...”

“... We are living through a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican, an age of mass production. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucket-load. It seems a shame to have all the virtues required for beatification, but not to get your full name in the Catholic Almanac Online ...”

“... and get a laugh from the audience. Lully, while conducting his own Te Deum, stabbed himself in the foot with the staff he was using to rap out the beat for the players, and later died from gangrene: an allegory perhaps of Tár’s own remorseless self-devastation.In Lully’s time the orchestra was in its infancy. The Vingt-Quatre Violons du Roi was a crack ...”

“... blow rather than the scrupulous fleck of paint. It’s as if Rodin had apprenticed himself to Gwen John, and that isn’t at all how their story played out. After The Ghost Writer Zuckerman became Roth’s stand-in of choice, in Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson, the three books being republished in 1985 as the trilogy Zuckerman Bound, with The Prague ...”

“... 2005 papal conclave, when he was the main contender against Joseph Ratzinger after the death of John Paul II. It centred on the arrest and torture of two Jesuit priests, Oswaldo Yorio and Franz Jalics. Bergoglio had known both of them since the early 1960s – they had been his teachers. By the time Bergoglio took over as provincial of Argentina and ...”

“... Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), his influential study of elitism in 20th-century literature, John Carey writes about the ‘duplicity’ of Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel supposedly about love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written ...”

“... was more fraught and less integrated, but also freer than the Confucian scholar bound hand and foot by ritual and etiquette. In these respects, Furman concluded, Christianity proved in the end more hospitable than Confucianism to cultural creativity and social change. No value judgment was involved, just one of the relative weight of their ideals in the ...”

“... won admirers among the black writers who emerged during the Black Power era, such as LeRoi Jones, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed. And his legacy now? As Jackson writes, ‘history has borne out some of his vinegary judgments.’ Today, Himes’s belief in the implacable force of white supremacism – what is now called Afro-pessimism – enjoys a growing ...”

“... and Lesbian Centre. (Margaret Thatcher may be impossible to displace as a totem of oppression, but John Major has been prime minister for a couple of years by the time the book begins.) The only actual gay character in the book, if you exclude the passing dreamboat in his van, is Chickie Jamieson, an elderly, unthreatening and neuter-seeming neighbour of the ...”

“... forbidden pleasure. Herschel Shawmut, maudit monologist of Saul Bellow’s story ‘Him with His Foot in His Mouth’, describes the impulse to speak his mind as ‘seizure, rapture, demonic possession, frenzy, Fatum, divine madness, or even solar storm’. Haunted in old age by his least forgivable outburst, Shawmut remembers how he and his friend Eddie ...”

“... a staff of 16, including a chef, a governess – he had no children – a maître d’hôtel, two foot servants, a washerwoman, three chauffeurs, three gardeners, three cooks and a valet de chambre. There, a world of dreamlike, amoral, atemporal artifice prevailed. Roussel would order that the entire day’s meals, prepared by an Escoffier-trained cook, be ...”

“... though for me it spoils the ‘line’ of the poem – was reinstated at the petitioning of John Berryman in For the Union Dead (1964); a revised version of that is printed as a separate poem called ‘Ovid and Caesar’s Daughter’ in History (1973); and now Bidart and Gewanter have unearthed a seven-stanza monster that was printed in the Kenyon ...”

“... the inauguration of the new Bavarian Parliament on 21 February. Going to the opening ceremony on foot, and heedless of the repeated threats to his life he had received since coming to power, he was confronted by an embittered, anti-semitic Bavarian aristocrat called Count Anton von Arco-Valley, who shot him dead. The moral renewal of Bavarian politics was ...”

“... by levelling a tax on every financial transaction. It has been embraced by the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, and 11 European countries plan to introduce something like it, called the Financial Transaction Tax. Britain will not be one of those countries while the Conservatives are in charge. Shifting vast, destabilising amounts of money from place to ...”

“... for their root causes. He took out a subscription to New Internationalist. He read Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Greg Palast. ‘It slowly dawned on me,’ he wrote, ‘that there could be a hidden hand behind seemingly random, unconnected events. I came to this realisation myself, long before hearing of the term “conspiracy theory” or “new world ...”