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James Hurley - forehead contorted into the bland echo of a mummified Incan princeling - can never be cool. He is ‘the original sad boy’. Sad reacts only.

The 2009 film The Last Station, based on a fine book by Jay Parini and featuring Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, made the story of Lev Tolstoy’s last days accessible to many who had not read the biographies.

What was heartening about the general election was that it suggested a new symbolic status for policy of the sort that technocratic politics was unable to manufacture.

Before the books arrived, Adam Gopnik, in an effort to be polite, almost contradicted the essential insight of his life.

Comedy is hardly the first thing one associates with Sebald’s work, partly because his reputation was quickly associated with the literature of the Holocaust

The word translation itself contains the prefix trans, signifying movement rather than stability. Instead of thinking of translation as an exchange of “this” for “that” we are looking for pieces that somehow seek to retain the quality of movement and motion and change between languages and cultures.

The opening scene of Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Men Explain Things to Me” is, by now, a familiar one, not only because it’s repeated so often whenever Solnit is written about