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“... It is perhaps unkind to disturb the ashes of C. P. Snow. They have so recently been placed in the Fellows’ Garden at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he is commemorated beside John Milton. There is occasion to take a look at them, nonetheless, for we now have this account of the man by his brother, Philip Snow ...”

“... outcome. Schell treats the preoccupations of China’s intellectuals as the central reality. Philip Snow defines his China in terms of a contrast, between what Kang Yuwei, the late 19th-century reformer, used to call the gold and the black. Few people are less like Chinese than Africans, and The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa spells out ...”

“... Can you name the author who set you thinking? For Philip French, at a Bristol grammar school in the 1950s, the enlighteners were Edmund Wilson, F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling. For me, at a Wimbledon grammar school in the 1950s, Bertrand Russell filled the slot on his own, largely because his History of Western Philosophy was so long ...”

“... at work in the Oval Office. The fireplace fire is lit with the air-conditioning on full blast. To Philip Roth, for His Eightieth I’m Mussolini, And the woman spread out on my enormous Duce desk looks teeny. The desk becomes an altar, sacred. The woman’s naked. I call the woman teeny only because I need the rhyme. The shock of naked looks huge on top of a ...”

“... before sex; his sister’s hair later ‘framed her face in burning scoops’; and at the end in snow ‘a few large scoops and scallops of green cleared like whole islands’. We can wonder if the echoes are meant, and, if so, what they mean. There is evidently a diction in use, and readers will differ as to whether it bespeaks close observation or the ...”

“... Friedrich, the young protagonist of Philip Hensher’s third novel, Pleasured, lives the sort of dismal half-life that was possible in Berlin before the Wall came down, the period when West Germans received subventions just for taking up residence there. It was a city that attracted the very old, who needed to bulk up their pensions, and the young, who wanted to study or just vegetate – or to escape compulsory military service (another advantage of living in Berlin ...”

“... alone cannot account for the tremendous success of Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, even if it does open with a bleak Copenhagen December, and go on to describe a still colder place – Greenland, covered by an icecap up to a mile thick, with a climate so severe that if you need to drop your trousers to relieve yourself, you must first ...”

“... home from school. It was a lovely, sunny autumn day, with spiderwebs flying about in the air like snow. We were barefoot that day, like every day from spring to late autumn. Every villager dreamed of owning a pair of boots. We children were lucky if we had a decent pair of shoes. We wiped our noses on our sleeves and kept our trousers up with a piece of ...”

“... and physical collapse, he nonetheless goes out at night to shovel six inches of fresh March snow from the sidewalk in front of the imprisoning store. When I got home that evening, I reread the pages describing the grocer’s last great effort to do his job. To his surprise the wind wrapped him in an icy jacket, his apron flapping noisily. He had ...”

“... Philip Roth likes, or has liked, to describe himself as a ‘suppositional’ novelist. Much of his writing practice, he has said, takes off from a ‘what if?’ What if Franz Kafka had made it to America and there lived on to become a New Jersey schoolmaster? What if Anne Frank had survived and found out about the publication of her diary from a chance reading of Time magazine? What if a man could actually become a breast? What if a decent, shamefaced Jewish boy were to extol the joys of masturbation? And what if we, Roth’s readers, could join in and ask, for instance, what if an earnest young Jewish novelist of the 1950s were to find himself unfairly chastised for his disloyalty to Jews? And what if this same novelist decided to respond by handing his chastisers something they could really, and fairly, get to work on? What if he were to zap them with Portnoy’s Complaint and proceed to sell half a million copies of said horror to the Gentiles? And what if he were then to find himself outlawed and reviled, not just by tribal religious types but even by wise, novel-reading intellectuals? What if one of these intellectuals were to call Portnoy ‘the book of which all anti-semites have been dreaming?’ And what if yet another were to dismiss this earnest young Jewish novelist of the 1950s as a mere pedlar of cheap gags? ‘The cruellest thing anybody can do to Portnoy’s Complaint is to read it twice,’ said Irving Howe – and this was just about the cruellest thing he could do to Philip Roth ...”

“... a child with images of skeletal remains and naked women being chased by dogs across the Polish snow. Holocaust for Kidz will deliver a carefully tailored miasma of fear, rage, impotence and guilt in children as young as ten. Through the magic of Animatronics, Claymation and Jurassic technology, the inane ramblings of underqualified American Hebrew day ...”

“... Glavinic’s protagonist, gets up one morning and switches on the TV. There is no picture, only snow. He checks the post, but the paper hasn’t been delivered. He tries to check his email, but the server is down. He walks to the bus stop, but no bus arrives. And there are no cars. And no people, and no birds. He calls his girlfriend Marie, who is visiting ...”

“... of John Aubrey’s 17th-century writing. ‘My great Uncle … remembred him,’ Aubrey wrote of Philip Sidney, dead for three generations, ‘and sayd that he was wont, as he was hunting on our pleasant plaines, to take his Table booke out … and write downe his notions as they came into his head when he was writing his Arcadia.’ Searching for memories ...”

“... her scatterbrained promiscuity and her early life. The other story is about a neurologist called Philip Wild, a man of a certain age and an even more certain obesity. He writes in the first person of what he calls ‘the art of self-slaughter’, not suicide but a form of mental magic, in which he makes his unloved body disappear bit by bit, only to ...”

“... looked out of the window in the early morning and realised the neighbourhood was so deep under snow that it had to be dealt with, and they all turned out. A stranger took a picture one year, and when it appeared in the paper the caption underneath read: ‘We’re not waiting for the council’s snowplough. We’re not waiting for anyone. We are the ...”