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“... The​ world according to Deborah Levy is like an emotionally charged dream or joke. A man accepts soup from an elderly neighbour and retches, catlike, on a mouthful of grey hair. People walk around naked in public. A corpse in a swimming pool is revealed not to be a corpse but a stammering, unstable young woman; a murdered teenage daughter turns out merely to have got her first period and to have abandoned her blood-stained bed to seek comfort in someone else’s; eventually, another body shows up in the pool ...”

“... dealers from North London, boring, rather foodie, with an interest in old guns. The swimming pool, Levy warns us, is ‘more like a pond’ than pools usually look like in shiny brochures. But still, we think we understand what we’re seeing: the villa, the pool, the white recliners on the hot, dry terrace; ‘the bittersweet smell of lavender’; the family ...”

“... as is my shame at sleeping five nights of the week in the storeroom above the Coffee House). Deborah Levy is interested in women who don’t have homes and aren’t sure where to look for them, who sleep above shops or coffee houses, who seem to keep themselves displaced and feel easiest when they’re travelling or alone; women who like to dissect ...”

“... after the manuscript was first submitted to W.H. Smith, who said that it wouldn’t sell enough. Deborah Levy has recently had a new novel out, good enough to make you want to read it again as soon as you’ve finished it. Numerous mainstream publishers decided not to take it on because, as she explained, ‘the fear among those who admired it was that ...”

“... which offers historical context and some account of the poem’s original reception; a foreword by Deborah Levy, which doesn’t know what it’s doing but is determined to show support; and a little crowd of jacket puffs. We learn that Harrison and Mirrlees knew Gertrude Stein but weren’t part of the avant-garde set; that there are buried references to ...”

“... depressing, stuck in bleak unmediated attitudes of despair. Later, I came to make distinctions. Deborah Levy’s Beautiful Mutants is recognisably a prose poem, inhabited by characters who sound as if they have survived from some old Third Programme verse play circa 1950 – The Poet, The Prostitute, The Banker, The Golden Slut etc. It is also the most ...”

“... attracted powerful female interpreters: Maria Callas in Pasolini’s film (1969), Fiona Shaw in Deborah Warner’s production (2001), and among writers, Toni Morrison, who slants the myth through her novel Beloved (1987), as does Marina Carr more directly in her play By the Bog of Cats (1998), which is set in a traveller community in Ireland. Rachel ...”

“... boxes to amuse Robert, or that he was influenced by the miniaturised life of Robert’s train set. Deborah Solomon finds no evidence for this, though it appears that the meals Joseph made for Robert ‘always consisted of the most incredible colours ... He used to squeeze violets on top of mushroom soup to make it lilac-coloured.’ If he had not seen some Max ...”

“... The ‘philosophy of desire’ was born in 1969, Serge Gainsbourg’s année érotique, when the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari met the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Today, it’s hard to imagine them not knowing each other, and easy to forget how unlikely their partnership was. François Dosse begins his biography of the two men with their first encounter, a year after the ‘events’ of 1968, which, more than anything, inspired their collaboration ...”

“... blasphemy. The introductory chapter of Blasphemy, by the great American legal scholar Leonard Levy, covers ‘the Jewish trial of Jesus’; it is followed in close succession, in Levy’s account, by the Christian invention of the concept of heresy and the persecution of the Socinian and Arminian heretics and later of ...”