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“... In​ 1926, Graham Greene received a diagnosis of epilepsy. In all likelihood, he didn’t have the disorder. His only symptoms were three isolated episodes of lost consciousness: once in the school chapel at Berkhamsted; once in the London home of his psychoanalyst; and once in the offices of the Times, where he was working as an assistant editor. But the neurologist he consulted thought these episodes were sufficient grounds for the diagnosis, and the news nearly led Greene to throw himself in front of a speeding tube train ...”

“... As psychiatric concepts go,​ autism has proved uncommonly susceptible to interpretation, appropriation and expansion. And few people have done as much to influence the world’s understanding of autism as Lorna Wing, who died in 2014. For decades a member of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, Wing was a pioneering clinician, epidemiologist and researcher ...”

“... In the technical literature on aesthetics a distinction is often made between the empirical inquiry into beauty (what it is, which objects have it and so forth), and the investigation of sensory cognition. The former became subsumed in the 18th century into the theory of taste and has ever since been in the ascendant, while the latter (what Alexander Baumgarten called ‘the science of aesthetics’) has suffered mixed fortunes ...”

“... Several factors​ contribute to the innocuousness of Ali Smith’s current project. She’s now published two novels of her projected ‘Seasonal Quartet’: Autumn, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Winter. These books don’t share characters or continuity but constitute a rapid-response literary gloss on the Brexit crisis ...”

“... Mothers​ have a hard time in Ali Smith’s novels. I mean that Smith gives them a hard time, as well as acknowledging the hard time they’ve had already, just getting this far, in one piece. In Summer, the final novel of Smith’s seasons quartet, the harried mother is Grace ...”

“... judges have dished up a perishable selection. Will Eaves’s The Oversight (Picador, £12) follows Daniel Rathbone as he progresses through a school in Bath in the 1980s and then leaves his parents’ home for life in London; it’s a funny, heartfelt story about coming out and coming of age. The best stretch in the book details the awkwardness of teenage life ...”

“... label of NW2; there are houses that go for £800,000. It’s where White Teeth is set. Zadie Smith won a kind of lottery: £250,000 in a two-book deal, and there’s a £5 million BBC adaptation on the way. She was one of the deserving – just a step away from the prize-winning bus-driver novelist – only 23, half-Jamaican, half-English, parents ...”

“... and laborious life: it is also about writing, rewriting and the telling of lies. According to Daniel Roche, whose hundred-page commentary could be a book in itself, Ménétra fashioned his work in several stages and, over a lifetime of composition, took it through several revisions, the last one in the Napoleonic period. What we see is the transformation ...”

“... and find that we were ‘out of time’. But now? Well, ‘it’s here and I like it,’ as Will Smith says in his greeting card to the new year ‘Will 2K’. There isn’t much anxiety in this song, it’s time to celebrate. What exactly? The ‘Willennium’, he helpfully suggests, ‘the party of a lifetime ... resolution: get the money’. Future ...”

“... Women Poets (1991), Douglas Dunn’s Faber Book of 20th-century Scottish Poetry (1992), and Daniel O’Rourke’s Dream State; The New Scottish Poets (1994) all offer work in the three languages, but, as their titles indicate, select from specific sectors of Scottish poetry. When we compare Watson’s volume with its main competitors, the Penguin and ...”

“... At this point his name itself seems to carry with it a shadowy memory of In Cold Blood’s Perry Smith: like Capote, Perry Scholes tries to make himself invisible, but can’t help being bound up in what he is documenting. He is also trailing Sligo. In the days after the shooting, it turns out, Sligo broke into the Bluebird shopping mall and camped inside an ...”

“... lights were nine elderly men, all into their seventies or beyond. Their names were Walter Brudno, Smith Brookhart, Nick Doman, Benjamin Ferencz, Whitney Harris, Charles Horsky, Henry King, Daniel Margolies and Walter Rockler, and they had all been prosecuting lawyers at the Nuremberg Trial and Subsequent Proceedings in ...”

“... to The Virgin in the Garden declares the double – or complicatedly single – intention. Daniel, a priest, leaves an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery which has gathered, retrospectively and iconically, many of the concerns of the main action of the book, set 16 years earlier, to which we are about to be introduced. ...”

“... Lower down in the boat, in the forward steerage area, water was coming in. An emigrant called Daniel Buckley jumped out of bed and soon found his feet were getting wet. He shared a cabin with three others: when he told them that water was coming in, they laughed. ‘Get back into bed,’ one of them said. ‘You’re not in Ireland now.’ August ...”

“... Shortly after her husband’s death, Joy Williams entrusted the task to the Welsh historian Dai Smith, who had known (and greatly admired) Williams in the last decade or so of his life, and who shared many of his political allegiances. Smith was given unrestricted access to Williams’s papers; as, in effect, the ...”