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“... Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary is a huge grab-bag of a book, probably the least known of all his important works outside Russia – though in this regard his marvellous, semi-autobiographical prison-camp memoir, House of the Dead, runs it a close second. Read in the West only by professional Slavists and students of Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary allows us to see him at both his best and his worst ...”

“... Up until the late Fifties, Mikhail Bakhtin was completely unknown in his own country. Then a group of graduate students at the Gorky Institute of World Literature, who had come across the first version of his book on Dostoevsky (1929) and wondered about his fate, discovered to their astonishment that he was still alive and teaching at an obscure institute in the Russian provinces ...”

“... Chekhov biographers are lucky: they don’t have to face the problem of spending a good deal of time studying the life of someone they are liable to end up disliking intensely. Lawrence Thompson was selected by Robert Frost to be his official biographer: after literally living with his subject, the biographer found the poet to be very far from admirable; and the work he produced bore clear evidence of this shift in sentiment ...”

“... The title of Orlando Figes’s impressively wide-ranging book refers to a scene in War and Peace in which Natasha Rostov, the finest product of the European education favoured by the Russian aristocracy for more than a century, visits the far from luxurious home of a distant relative. He is a nobleman living in the country with his serf ‘wife’, Anisya; he has, it seems, abandoned that superior attitude to the Russian ‘people’, the narod, that generally characterises his class ...”

“... Dostoevsky in the 1840s, a caustic and iconoclastic rising star, was the subject of Joseph Frank’s first volume of biography and critique, The Seeds of Revolt. This volume stood out from many rival studies for the thoroughness of its research, the generosity of its approach (to Dostoevsky and to other critics), its intelligent judgment of Dostoevsky’s psychology and literary intentions, and, rarest quality of all in the Dostoevsky industry, for its sheer readability ...”

“... of a brush. The glance at Voltaire, the mention of Luther and the Enlightenment, all indicate, as Joseph Frank says, a crafty parody of advanced Russian thought. Fyodor Pavlovich is not an intellectual, but he knows how intellectuals talk. But of course he is up to other mischief as well. He is teasing his son, he is mocking both doubt and faith, both ...”

“... some of his most profound statements on art, society, religion and the creative process. Joseph Frank’s biography calls these years ‘miraculous’ yet the conditions under which Dostoevsky was working were anything but splendid. In the novels, thrilling conversations about ultimate questions typically take place in the most sordid ...”

“... more adept at creating works of art out of his response to them, and one of the best features of Joseph Frank’s five-volume study is the erudition with which the background of current affairs and polemic is filled in. This concentration on local detail has the welcome effect of diminishing the rather melodramatic image of Dostoevsky which previous ...”

“... very different from what we customarily get under the heading of ‘spatial form’, a term that Joseph Frank coined many years ago in connection with the novel (Frank, incidentally, doesn’t appear in Moretti’s text or bibliography). Frank’s coining was essentially a Modernist ...”

“... its keep. Batuman doesn’t avoid the comic spotlight, making a spectacle of herself in front of Joseph Frank by launching into a joke about Thor and a farmer’s daughter. (The punchline, which she decides against sharing with America’s greatest living Dostoevskian, is: ‘I’m thor, too, but I had tho much fun.’) But she’s less self-revealing ...”

“... it in mind to please potentially interested Gentiles. But there are many more fertile conjectures. Joseph is called ‘the husband of Mary’ in Matthew’s genealogy. In Luke, Jesus is called ‘the son (as was supposed) of Joseph’. Joseph, who figures in the Infancy stories and nowhere ...”

“... Ian Watt began work on this book in 1955, and the intervening years have seen a boom in Conrad studies: but the thought that there might be nothing left for him to say quite rightly didn’t enter his head. What’s more, he has only just got under way: for all that it contains close on 200,000 words, this book is merely an antechapel to the main building ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... failure of the Tories to achieve a majority at the General Election of 1885 was a consequence of Joseph Chamberlain’s Third Reform Bill. The newly enfranchised idiots have satisfied the yearnings of Mr Chamberlain’s herd [‘heart’, perhaps? Jean-Aubry again] by cooking the national goose according to his recipe. The new culinary operation will be a ...”

“... these novels burdened by exactly that fallacy, and had my expectations confounded in every case. Joseph O’Connor’s Desperadoes seesaws between Dublin and Nicaragua, and seems at first to be drawing political parallel between the two locations; but it turns out to be primarily a raw, highly emotional account of marital breakdown. Eoin McNamee’s ...”