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“... art, the individual brush strokes in a canvas by Renoir are randomly shaped and coloured seen from close up, yet when viewed from a distance the whole becomes the image of a field of flowers. It is the very inadequacy of the brush strokes themselves that shows the emergence of the painting to be a result of their organisation. Analogously, individual atoms can ...”

“... When yachts set sail with the tide, or people gather to witness a total eclipse of the Sun, they are trusting in Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. For more than three hundred years his theory has proved so accurate in describing the universe that it has enabled us not only to predict tides and eclipses, but even to send spaceships to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond ...”

“... and greed, then entered a long period of subsidence and even now resists complete deflation. Frank Close is an English physicist and writer about science who followed the cold fusion story as it unfolded and has now presented his analysis. He tells a good yarn, and his firm grasp of the science enables the reader to savour the blunders of Pons and ...”

“... the sink on New Year’s Eve twenty years ago. Knausgaard, it seemed, was a superman, his past as close to him as the present. It’s a large part of the thrill and wonder of his books: he appears to be giving an entire and precise account of his life, relationships, thoughts, feelings, what everyone says, and everything he encounters as he leaves his ...”

“... grew apart. The surprising thing is that, given their temperamental differences, they remained so close for so long. Nabokov’s critical remarks rarely resemble Wilson’s; his judgments on authors are decisive but hardly ever justified by argument. There is a long list of manifest frauds and charlatans, headed by Dostoevsky and Freud. Eliot is a fake, Mann ...”

“... writes: ‘Yes, I’d like that very much. That really would be something to look forward to.’ Frank was already weakened and wasted by throat cancer, but my suggestion that we go to watch some cricket at Fenner’s did seem genuinely to appeal to him. There wasn’t much to look forward to by this point. On the appointed day the weather was kind, and ...”

“... atrocities, outside the special case of Belfast, occur in areas with Nationalist majorities close to the border, where by any normal criterion the security forces are occupation forces. Wilson himself thinks that the Crossmaglen area, the notorious murder triangle on the border in South Armagh, ought to be conceded to the Republic ...”

“... the Railway Station’: ‘And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang/With grimful glee …’ Frank Auerbach to William Feaver And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang With grimful glee: ‘This life so free Is the thing for me!’ And the constable smiled, and said no word. Thomas Hardy, ‘At the Railway Station, Upway’ I remember​ the first ...”

“... from its homeland whom one might expect to become the Parsees of the next millennium, using the close-knit ties of religious distinctiveness to concentrate on economic survival. Instead, we find a national élite of conspicuously outward-looking teachers, winning proselytes in different countries who will not only sustain their tradition but spread it ...”

“... Richard Ford’s narrator, Frank Bascombe, quit serious writing to become a sports-writer. This was the making of Ford. It wasn’t until he became Bascombe, the sportswriter, that Ford turned himself into a major novelist. At odd moments in The Sportswriter, Frank looks back on his abandoned literary career ...”

“... of ‘incompetant’ conducting and playing; most of the rest, always excepting his teacher Frank Bridge, have fallible technique. Bernard van Dieren (who fails to achieve a mention of any sort in the notes) is ‘puerile’. Bliss provides ‘unoriginal piffle’. The first complete performance of Walton’s Symphony in November 1935 is ‘a great ...”

“... no sooner has one adventure been concluded than another begins. The narrative questions open and close, open and close, like the contraction of the vaginal muscles in intercourse, and this process is in principle endless. The greatest and most characteristic romances are often unfinished ... Romance is multiple ...”

“... seemed like a biological necessity.The counter-example to everything Hughes excoriates in SoHo is Frank Auerbach. His monograph is extremely well illustrated. The drawings come across with depth and range and the paintings have been photographed with close and unexaggerated attention to their surface. The colour is ...”

“... There were already good biographies of Shaw, notably those of Frank Harris and Hesketh Pearson, both of whom knew Shaw and had the benefit of his energetic interventions. Pearson in particular will not be easily supplanted. Nevertheless the archives of the world are full of Shaviana inaccessible before his death, and because there had not been a serious attempt since 1956 – the centenary year – the Shaw Estate sensibly decided that the time had come for a new biography, and invited Mr Holroyd to write it ...”

“... Lonoff seems to be the mask of the novelist Bernard Malamud (though the resemblance doesn’t seem close) and Amy is imagined to be possibly Anne Frank, rescued and resettled in America. Strange identifications echo round Roth’s collected works, and they aid the creation of narrative and biographical ambiguities that serve ...”