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“... In different ways, most of Ian McEwan’s novels and stories are about trauma and contingency, and he is now best known as the great contemporary stager of traumatic contingency as it strikes ordinary lives. In The Child in Time, a child goes missing at a supermarket, and Stephen and Julie’s domestic existence is shattered; in Enduring Love, Clarissa and Joe witness the death of John Logan as he falls from a balloon, are changed for ever, and spend the rest of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black Dogs is in part about how Bernard Tremaine, a politician, scientist and rationalist, drifts away from his wife, June (and vice versa), because of what he deems her fanciful, emotional, overdetermined reading of the trauma that was meted out on her in 1946 by the black dogs of the title ...”

“... investigating the realities of bishops’ power in the Auvergne of the sixth and seventh centuries Ian Wood’s mastery of the evidence and strong sense of place permit him to follow a slow tracking-shot of the hills and cornfields around Clermont with a sudden zoom in on figures like the priest Epachius, ‘notable as a senator and as an ...”

“... is no defence, innocence doesn’t stand a chance. A complex variant of this scene haunts Ian McEwan’s fiction, and creates, among other things, an eerie resonance for the mild-seeming title of his remarkable new novel. For McEwan, the innocent is never entirely innocent, always has a murky relation to the corpse and the knife. But an innocence ...”

“... Palace, the museum of labour history on Glasgow Green. A bronze bust of Willie Gallacher by Ian Walters was not so much unveiled as proclaimed. It sits at the top of the building, in the room where Ken Currie’s controversial Rivera-style murals of working-class history can be seen around the ceiling: but the speeches were made in the Winter Garden ...”

“... in a wicker chair, checking a page in his typewriter. The picture appears on the covers both of Ian Hamilton’s Writers in Hollywood and of Tom Dardis’s Some Time in the Sun and instantly announces several elements of a familiar legend. Even in black and white the image is full of warm shadows, and the uncropped version fills out the legend a little ...”

“... already everywhere, but no one knew it. It’s the greatest cover-up in human history, to quote Ian McKellen quoting Dan Brown. During the Cannes screening of the film critics are said to have laughed when a crowd of bewigged ghosts shows up for Newton’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, forcing the live characters to elbow their way through the shades to ...”

“... world’s longest escalator takes you well away from screaming Boat People and wet ropes slopping wood. Children of six and seven play inside the Walled City; no more walled than you or I. ‘I mean, it was a million to one chance we’d walk past that shop again and then she dashed out to tell me she’d been through the whole shop and found the matching ...”

“... so that she can read them later. There is also a flashback to a time when Zeena and her partner (Ian Keith; David Strathairn) were in vaudeville. Their act involved working a complicated code, where one of them would apparently be repeating questions from the audience but was actually signalling facts about the questioners. In the city, a different kind of ...”

“... merely literary’. But then language itself, on the editors’ account, is a poor thing. Ian McMillan’s work is praised for treating language ‘with a healthy Post-Modern disrespect’; Glyn Maxwell’s verse ‘reminds us that language is always debased currency.’ Again, this is vulgar and hasty. Language is a currency, but – exactly like a ...”

“... Royal Court. The play purports to be an account of T. S. Eliot’s first marriage, to Vivien Haigh-Wood, and I had been pretty well put off it by Peter Redgrove’s letter to the TLS: ‘if Eliot’s diagnosis of the ills of our civilisation in prose and poetry had its root in his own sexual distress and inability in his prime to form a personal relationship ...”

“... attended to the trees (the kinds of disorder recognised in the manual), but few thought about the wood. I want to talk about the object as a whole – about the wood – and will seldom mention particular diagnoses, except when I need an example. Many worries have already been aired. In mid-May an onslaught was delivered by ...”

“... a version of Orwell’s Big Brother represented by a large-screen image of John Hurt impersonating Ian McKellen impersonating Hitler, and when the good guy sees himself as a reincarnation of a Catholic conspirator from four hundred years back, you have to think there is some distance between actuality and whatever is going on in this story. There are plenty of ...”

“... Parks. Now out on parole he has been given a new identity and must adopt the bland persona of Ian Wilkinson, a 20-year-old English student. Although Barker has left behind the vast historical rigging of Regeneration and its sequels – the preoccupations of the trilogy were still evident in her last novel, Another World – she has clearly drawn on real ...”

“... she’s better-looking than Stuart. Last week at lunch, much of the Oscar talk focused on Gordon Wood, Professor of History at Brown. Wood is here on a year’s fellowship to write Volume IV of the new Oxford History of the United Sates, but he has also spent the odd moment reflecting on Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, of Good ...”

“... of our God and King’. The negative, as Eliot has it in his essay on Dante in The Sacred Wood, ‘is the more importunate’. Which perhaps explains why Walcott’s poetry remains a challenge to taste: either his work is too rich, or our palettes are too ...”