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“... retire to the basket chair with a hurt expression or the remark ‘Mummy doesn’t want me, Jonathan.’ You will find me harder to dispose of than that, Precious, & J will be old enough by then to know when he’s playing gooseberry & will tactfully retire to the bathroom whilst we try and make up for lost time, holding close to each other & forgetting ...”

“... its reliance on the slightly shallow brilliance of simile as opposed to the deeper, more reflexive power of metaphor. You’re meant to be thrilled by it, but not to linger too long, for it’s leading you into a story, not trying to stop you in your tracks. In that respect, it is very like a lot of the best lines in current verse – lines that dazzle briefly ...”

“... but he seemed to have brought nothing back but Cartesian puritanism and a belief in the saving power of experimental literature (‘J’écris, donc je suis,’ as Camus put it). Sartre had been dazzled by the idea that there are no compelling reasons for living, and seemed to think that ‘life is tragic because it is miserable.’ Quite the ...”

“... that were capable of being explained scientifically. These religious zealots were lazy and power-drunk, he thought, and relied on laziness and credulity in others. What gives the Belfast address its particular interest is its context. In 1864 Pope Pius IX had declared his infallibility and in 1870 the Vatican Council had ratified it, leading among ...”

“... belief that if immigrants get ‘more’ of something (jobs, education, opportunities, political power), natives (or whites) must get less. This guides his discussion of the local economic impact of immigration in Merton, South-West London: ‘Poor whites [are] doing the worst of the lot.’ Such people have ‘mainly opted out: they seldom vote, and a lot ...”

“... warfare; he proceeded through the arrival and departure of the Romans, the rise and fall of feudal power, and the ‘madness’ of the civil wars, before concluding with the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688. But while he regarded the revolution as ‘a new epoch in the constitution’, he refused to go along with the sanctimonious Whigs who presented it as ...”

“... he was not martyred yet. Kellas couldn’t be sure. It requires something like the magnification power of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope to bring the war into sufficient focus for it to take on a personal dimension – a thought repeated again and again through the book. The reporter’s dislocation from events to which he’s attached only by his ...”

“... Love for Lydia seemed to me unsurpassably fine in their emotional eloquence and the transporting power of their natural descriptions. For a long time, I couldn’t imagine the existence of a greater novelist than Bates.In adolescence, my reading predictably widened in its range, but it hardly deepened. Joyce, Hardy, Dickens, Camus, George ...”

“... determine, the pursuit of political life. It is within this context of political mentalities that Jonathan Hughes situates his study of the Duke of York’s charismatic eldest son, Edward IV. Edward has always received a mixed historiographical press. Contemporaries recognised and celebrated his energy, intelligence and good fortune, but gave due weight as ...”

“... Jonathan Franzen​ has been compared to 19th-century greats: to Tolstoy, to Dickens. In respect of his best and most successful book, The Corrections, the praise carries a false hint of the retrograde, of revival of old forms or subject matter. Published at the turn of the millennium, The Corrections is a work of its time, not for its topical themes of dementia, the medicated society or stock market chicanery but for its approach to family ...”

“... other African countries and then, via the Hajj, as far afield as Indonesia. Larson recognised the power of the rumours, and she also recognised that the fact they were untrue, and could be proved so, was an insufficient counterweight to that power. Her book, mostly written before the current pandemic, looks at what she ...”

“... Twelve years ago​ Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy got divorced after ten years of marriage. In the unhappiness that followed he thought about himself and about society: would it break down too? In 1969, the year Mr Gathorne-Hardy got his decree nisi, there were 60,000 divorces in Britain: in 1980 there were 150,000. ‘During the last century of the Roman Empire, as a great civilisation collapsed, a raging epidemic of divorces roared unchecked ...”

“... years, Malamud has been championed by a new generation of Jewish-American writers. Dara Horn, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem and Jonathan Rosen have all written loving introductions to his novels, and sometimes it seems that what they most admire about them is all the ...”

“... a longish interruption in the summer, and a single further number in May 1729. It was written by Jonathan Swift and his friend Thomas Sheridan, a clergyman, schoolteacher and man of letters, and grandfather of the playwright. It includes at least two of Swift’s important works, his critique of the Beggar’s Opera in No 3, and a reprint of the ‘Short ...”

“... are wrong, and those who insist on it are wrong too. It’s not easy to win in such a competition. Jonathan Culler’s job is to portray him as a Modern Master – even Thody speaks of Barthes as a ‘major French writer’ without any sort of qualification – and he does this with subtlety and skill. There are many modes of mastery and Culler suggests ...”