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“... the extraordinary sums of money involved,1 were quickly followed by the prosecution in Britain of Michael Collier. Chairman of Morgan Grenfell, the largest securities firm in the City of London, for making an instantaneous profit of £15,000 on the purchase of shares in a company he knew was about to be taken over. A steady series of cases involving ...”

“... and studiously avoids political controversy. The book expands on a pair of articles (written with Michael Levi) in Foreign Affairs, which argued that recent fluctuations in the price of oil marked the end of a period of relative stability that began in the late 1970s. The first piece ran in 2011, when the yearly average price of Brent crude exceeded $100 ...”

“... Myriam Anissimov’s biography of Primo Levi, first published in French two years ago, begins with a kind of stutter surrounding the writer’s end. The book’s Introduction, prologue and opening chapter all invoke his death, as if it were a threshold that had to be crossed but couldn’t be crossed without returning ...”

“... vestige of reticence or shame) was the petit mal, dread of whose grand sequel blighted his life. Michael Thorn opens with a deferential salutation to ‘Professor Martin’s magisterial biography’. This is, however, decoy fire. What follows is a prolonged undermining of The Unquiet Heart (often without naming the author or his book). Thorn has many bones ...”

“... Structures​ don’t take to the streets’ was a famous Paris slogan of 1968, ‘Les structures ne descendent pas dans la rue.’ The implication was that structuralists didn’t take to the streets either, that current thought and theory represented only quietism. There was an echo here of a grand debate between Sartre and Lévi-Strauss, in which Sartre represented himself as engaged in history and Lévi-Strauss as a mere aesthete, dedicated to just watching things ...”

“... need to start thinking about the soundtrack, which includes some extraordinary non-music by Mica Levi. The film does open visually with the pastoral scene – but only after a six-minute period where it seems unlikely to begin at all. We looked at a black screen, listened to heavy, ghostly, synthesised sound with no sense of voices or instruments in it. As ...”

“... in human goodness, combined with the quickness of his insight into others. St Matthew, here called Levi Matvei or Matthew Levi, is the fanatic follower, endlessly writing down the master’s sayings and getting them wrong. Woland goes on to other business: namely, a magic show which involves showering the audience with ...”

“... with an oblique and cutting candour, a tubular coolness we must praise and praise again. Peter Levi, alas, is one of those dwindling, disinterested Arnoldians who can still be uncovered in the home of lost causes. Last year he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford and in his inaugural lecture announced: ‘Today is the feast of Crispinus and Crispianus; it ...”

“... quotation from one of them, is if anything worse.) After this, it is a relief to learn from Peter Levi’s lively and delightful biography that Dr Zhivago (Dr Alive) was a name Pasternak had seen on the cover of a Moscow manhole, rather as Dickens claimed to have spotted a Copperfield and a Chuzzlewit on the signs of poor London shops. Quite apart from its ...”

“... of Norman Mailer and other modern American writers. All these books are from literary stables. Michael Arlen’s first appeared in the New Yorker, and comes to the British reader via two very respected publishing houses (Fabers, incidentally, are apparently issuing the American edition with its original binding and title-page, without their own imprint: a ...”

“... was not at all Bakhtin’s story. He, like Jakobson, was well-born, into what Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, in their clumsily written but valuable biography, call the ‘landless nobility’; his father was an itinerant bank manager, which meant that the Bakhtins were used to living in the provinces. In the winter of 1917/8, aged 22, Bakhtin was in St ...”

“... never happened before, they were certain to happen again.’ This is the world of Kafka and Primo Levi, where the impossible keeps happening without damaging the idea of its impossibility. ‘The implausibility of their actions,’ Adorno astutely says of the National Socialists, ‘made it easy to disbelieve what nobody . . . wanted to believe.’ This is ...”

“... pursuits to write imitation Agatha Christie detective stories, so when I first learned that Michael Dummett, widely regarded as the most formidable philosopher of his generation, was about to publish a book about Tarot cards, I rather naturally assumed that it must be an exercise of this same recreational sort. In a certain very off-centre sense, my ...”

“... who refuses to acknowledge such a coarse bully as his successor. The books are worth buying for Dr Michael Heath’s edited translation of this work alone. I suppose Erasmus did write it, though he never acknowledged its paternity. The hardest task must have been Betty Radice’s in translating the inflated flatteries of the Panegyric for the Archduke Philip ...”

“... On​ 2 December 1978 Roland Barthes reported to an audience at the Collège de France on his desire to change as a writer, and told them about a specific moment when the thought of a ‘conversion’ hit him: 15 April that year. Casablanca. The sluggishness of the afternoon. The sky clouds over, a slight chill in the air … a kind of listlessness … bears upon everything I do … The beginnings of an idea … to enter into literature, into writing, to write, as if I had never written before: to do only that ...”