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“... his brother died on the Eastern Front and Fallada ‘discovers his heart for the revolution’. Jenny Williams’s meticulous biography More Lives than One narrates the 1911 episode in painstaking detail, but doesn’t pathologise Fallada’s entire life in the light of the early misfortune, as Fallada himself does. And to her, the outbreak of the ...”

“... poets of this past century and in bringing her work into the mainstream, where it belongs. Jenny Penberthy, a professor at Capilano College in Vancouver and the editor of Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet (1996) and Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky, 1931-70 (1993), devoted nearly ten years to this project, sorting through the formidable ...”

“... Rousseau, Hume, Comte, Marx, Bergson, William James, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Gramsci, Rowan Williams, Richard Dawkins, liberation theologians, Princess Diana, Professor Nutt, someone called Matthew Fox, Madonna, Cherie Blair – and Barack Obama. Nor is our gratitude due for her elucidation of why human beings are not in any way responsible for climate ...”

“... swarthy, a Jew tormented by self-loathing’ (voiced undoubtedly by a frantically guttural Robin Williams) scribbling The Communist Manifesto at his desk while a chorus of comically evil creditors sing a hummy hymn to capitalism, ‘We’ve got nothing to lose but our claims.’ Oh, what an exciting new century we have to look forward to. Wheen wants to ...”

“... book is taken up with a series of letters written over a period of years by Pitt-Kethley to Hugo Williams, in the hope that he would finally come to requite her love for him. She offers these letters to the world as evidence of her real self. They are truer than her other writing, she says, because ‘they reveal all of myself – the tender side as well as ...”

“... 1984 radio play, the young Solly Daniels writes a note to a girl asking her out: ‘Dear Jenny, I know that I don’t know you very well so please forgive me for just writing to you like this.’ ‘Where,’ asks the girl, ‘did he learn to write like that?’ That question resonates. The first joke it contains is that he learnt to write like that ...”

“... along to see the film being made; they were shooting a classroom scene between Mulligan and Olivia Williams, who was playing her English teacher. ‘Do you think he was a paedophile?’ Williams asked. And without a second’s thought I answered yes. Amanda Posey, the co-producer of the film, almost fainted. Apparently this ...”

“... Christmas film favourite’) to Charlie’s Angels (‘the ladies are not actual angels’). Jenny Smedley, a TV presenter and the author of a book called Come Back to Life (I don’t know whether the title is imperative or adjectival or both), puffs An Angel Treasury as ‘the only angel book I’ve read where there really doesn’t seem to be a thing ...”

“... become a spiritualist, and is certain it’ll all come right in his next incarnation. Tennessee Williams, anyone? Best, I suppose, to get back to the land of disappearing faxes. Anyway, I’ve got a lunch date at The Ivy with my publisher: maybe she knows what ...”

“... ennui when we have old-fashioned boredom?In a subtle piece for this paper (15 December 2005), Jenny Diski answered the question by looking into English uses of ‘je ne sais quoi’: ‘a public phrase for the mannered’, as she called it. The English language isn’t keen on the ineffable – in his book on translation David Bellos memorably says that ...”

“... Hard to imagine​ a brisker, bleaker opening than this one from the title story of Joy Williams’s 2004 collection, Honoured Guest: She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny in the eleventh grade and you had to be careful about this because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left 24 suicide notes and had become just a joke ...”

“... over into self-disgust, and the skills that each of them possessed became worthless. Tennessee Williams said of Garbo, as he might have said of Brando: ‘How sad a thing for an artist to abandon his art. I think it’s much sadder than death.’ The autophagists eat themselves away and never satisfy their ...”

“... was printed it lacked all but the most rudimentary expressions of Enlightened doctrine. Now Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men, a collective biography of Erasmus Darwin and his extraordinary group of Midlands friends, announces its aim as the recovery of the repute and reality of their visionary milieu of science, industry and art from Romantic contempt and ...”

“... by her lover, giving herself up to drink and to a middle-aged widow with a ‘beaked head’ named Jenny Petherbridge. (Herring shows that the Petherbridge figure is a woman named Henriette Metcalf, who is quoted in Andrew Field’s 1983 biography of Djuna Barnes, but whose real name could not at that time be revealed.) When her eight-year relationship with ...”

“... chapters she’d best skip. He explains, finally: ‘In her incisive analysis of Psycho, Linda Williams argues that the film should be considered “quintessentially postmodern”. In the same way, I should like to argue that my book about Psycho is also “quintessentially postmodern” [sic].’ I suppose that the scattered structure is the postmodernism ...”