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“... books. She reads Freud and Poe and Ursula Le Guin and Dostoevsky, and gets over her loathing of Philip Roth’s misogyny to find a surprising richness in the Bundism-Zionism face-off dramatised in Operation Shylock (1993); her bad back, her son’s neuroatypicality, the No Logo seam-rippers she handed out on her first ever book tour, all are given their ...”

“... that gave Braudel’s masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), its strikingly original structure. Braudel told the history of the Mediterranean in three acts. First came an inquiry into the imperceptibly slow history of geography and climate, which ‘exists almost out of time’. The second took up the ...”

“... There remains a most decided difference – indeed it grows wider every year – between what Philip Larkin calls ‘being a writer’, or ‘being a poet’, and managing to write something which will delight or amaze people without their having to respond to it in the context of poets and writers. Religion and other activities used to concentrate an audience by figuring in a non-literary context, and Blake or Emily Dickinson used religion, as they used the context of childhood responses, to appeal directly to an audience over the head, as it were, of literature ...”

“... of Phena at News of Her Death’. It had previously come to mind at news of another death, Philip Larkin’s, because of his once pinpointing essentially the birth of his own art: the moment when he stopped condescending to Hardy’s. ‘As regards his verse I shared Lytton Strachey’s verdict that “the gloom is not even relieved by a little ...”

“... Portnoy complained that his life was a Jewish joke, and Philip Roth himself once suggested that American reality beggared the imagination of even the most extravagant novelist. Who could have invented Eisenhower, he asked, and no sooner had he invented a caricature of Richard Nixon in Our Gang than Nixon turned out to be caricaturing himself in the same way, locker-room slang and all ...”

“... Haruki Murakami’s translator, Philip Gabriel, describes him as a ‘one-man revolution in Japanese fictional style’. His early novels and short stories of the 1980s – playful, wry, experimental, saturated in references to Western culture – made him the spiritual cheerleader of a new generation of writers ...”

“... the ridiculous blend of deference and denial that goes into the making of public support for it. Philip Ziegler is a historian of uncommon candour and, especially considering the ‘authorised’ nature of his work, unusual humour. Yet in the very first paragraph of his very first page he pitches face-forward into the enduring fallacy that sustains our ...”

“... Rieu?) who, asked to tea, breaks the Crown Derby, the Hepplewhite chair, ruins the carpet – in short, all his hostess’s most treasured possessions, while she, dreadful woman, murmurs unnerving assurances that it is of no consequence. The whole situation appeals to a child’s sense of the risible – a holocaust that hasn’t been caused by ...”

“... working, and here the sense of comic futility is unmistakable. In his brief introduction, Philip Larkin recounts how this seventh Pym novel was rejected in 1963 by the publisher of the first six, Cape, not apparently because it would not sell but because the publisher’s readers just did not like it. Perhaps they disliked the boldness with which the ...”

“... subjects of Barrow’s ‘double portrait’, his friends Quentin Crisp and the surrealist poet Philip O’Connor, were both children of the Home Counties. Crisp, who began life as Denis Pratt, found his way to bohemia from the Pooterland of Egmont Road, Sutton. O’Connor spent a significant part of his tumultuous life in Dorking, a fact which the local ...”

“... be mobbed – in cartoon prose – by the dinner-jacketed audience of the Comédie Française (‘short fat little arms have seized hold of Eluard ... Eluard rolls with a heap of other bodies down the monumental staircase of the Grand Circle’). He reads Russian, French, German, English, American, Spanish and Japanese books ...”

“... as an exploration, the discovery of an ambitious subject. Falling apart is in this sense a bit short on vivifying contexts. The figure of Bettina Joy, Harry’s embittered, adulterous wife, obsessed with worldly success and the image of New York (‘Bettina was burning brightly. She was consuming herself’) imprints itself on the reader’s memory more ...”

“... to Conrad’s Mirror of the Sea among them – nearly all the correspondence with writers that Philip Horne includes in his admirable new edition conforms to the pattern. Experienced recipients of such letters must have learned to watch for that ‘but’ and to steel themselves accordingly. Especially later in his career, James found it difficult to ...”

“... Braudel’s work was still centred on The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. This large book described History as a house of three storeys: structures – in other words, long-term developments, geographical factors, Islam, or the everlasting movement of flocks of sheep from the low ground to the high, between winter and ...”

“... As Norman Mailer used vociferously to demand, who will analyse the analysts, if not the artist? Philip Roth, like John Updike, is a survivor from the glory days of the heavyweights, the Hemingways and the Faulkners and the Bellows. His first book, the story collection Goodbye, Columbus, published in 1959, won the National Book Award, a notable achievement ...”