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“... interest in cultural memory led to studies of postcolonial memories and commemorations in Germany. Sebastian Conrad’s succinct book sums up this new literature and places it in the context of globalisation, which has led to a revival of interest in the empire. With its many excellent illustrations and maps, its annotated critical bibliography and its ...”

“... If the budget really wouldn’t stretch to it, they’d have done better to dispense with Sebastian Faulks’s introduction.It is a minor disgrace that an edition of one of the better novels of the 20th century should be so strewn with typographical errors. But it’s hardly a disgrace of the same order of magnitude as the thousands of police ...”

“... a rather nice man. Wilson, a full year after Nabokov entered his life, read The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and found it ravishing. At his best, Wilson was almost the perfect man of letters, the model reviewer, for he read indefatigably, was susceptible to talent, and had a useful vein of pedantry. These qualities made him especially valuable to ...”

“... of the North) but a good deal more cold-eyed than anything one would expect to find in the work of Sebastian Barry. Like Jack Ferris, the drunken protagonist of A Goat’s Song, Ireland binged for a few euphoric years, then woke up with an almighty hangover. The champions of progress have accordingly been forced to confront the uglier aspects of ...”

“... he resisted it admirably, and wrote such daring (if unpublished) poems as ‘The Love Song of St Sebastian’, in which the speaker and the beloved appear equally masochistic:I would come in a shirt of hair ...I would flog myself until I bled ...Until my blood should ring the lampAnd glisten in the light;I should arise your neophyte ...To follow where you ...”

“... was invoked as patron of the blind, St Agatha of breast cancer, and St Apollonia of toothache. St Sebastian, shot full of arrows ‘like a hedgehog’, came to be the patron of archers but also of the Black Death, perhaps by assimilation to Apollo, perhaps because his wounds suggested plague sores. Unofficially, as the only male saint martyred in the nude, he ...”

“... Claire Tomalin on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and as the limits on the new paper’s resources became apparent I thought how hard it would be to put together pages of comparable stature. There was one solace: the Independent on Sunday would be run by clear-eyed, yet ...”

“... ate it. Fest, stagnating in a prison camp near Laon in France, broadened his reading to discover Conrad, Maugham, Musil, Flaubert and even the disloyal Manns. He started work on a study of Renaissance history. By now his relations with some of the American camp staff were friendly, and he was particularly valued by the commandant, the sensitive, dandified ...”

“... seems to have been a fitful series of mildly obscene verses included in letters to such friends as Conrad Aiken. Gossips are not on oath. While these oral versions of biography paid tribute to the celebrity of the poet, the poetry was usually treated as quite impersonal. It had come, in the post-war years, under heavy academic protection: this was a time when ...”

“... Despite a steady supply of literary references and quotations that suggest high standards (Mann, Conrad, Forster, Shakespeare, both Eliots, Colette, Dante, James, Ibsen, Shaw, Proust, Shelley, Burke, Milton) her sentences are generally lethargic. Here’s some of Sylvie’s back story: ‘They sank into genteel and well-mannered poverty. Sylvie’s mother ...”

“... if it were the second coming of All Quiet on the Western Front. In the New York Times Book Review, Sebastian Junger described Matterhorn as ‘one of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam – or any war’; it ‘may well serve’, he said, ‘as a final exorcism for one of the most painful passages in American history’. It is ...”

“... coupling of man and woman’ with ‘Dung and death’. In ‘The Love Song of St Sebastian’ (1914), the young man in the first stanza pictures himself as a ‘neophyte’ preparing to join his lover, but must first whip himself till he bleeds, and only then, after ‘hour and hour of prayer/And torture and delight’, is he ready to ascend ...”