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“... sex, scandal and more sex. Even if Byron had written no best-sellers, he would have lived one. Frederic Raphael’s re-telling in Byron makes, predictably, a good read, but not by taking the easy course, which would have relied on Byron’s own racy descriptions of his life and loves. On the contrary, Raphael rises ...”

“... to humour a good man they feared might be under stress. I wish I could like Oxbridge Blues more. Frederic Raphael is a skilful mimic of speech styles, both British and American. He can write well and is quite often quite witty. ‘Welcome aboard’, a farcical sketch about flying fears, I found very funny. But many of his stories are clogged by a ...”

“... stylishly to the requirements of the Varsity novel: a genre patronised by Dorothy Sayers and Frederic Raphael, and to be distinguished from the campus novels (more academic, not so upper-class) of, say, Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. Miles Tattershall lectures, with moderate success, in 17th-century literature at Cambridge. He, too, is ...”

“... work makes us think again. We need to understand how the crass and the clunky can be interesting. Frederic Raphael’s memoir doesn’t help us much here. Raphael began writing what was to become Eyes Wide Shut in 1994, and describes in detail the harrowing job of producing draft pages for the scrutiny of the ...”

“... hated Jews as Jews. ‘English fiction has made fools and scoundrels of the Jews,’ Pearce quotes Frederic Raphael as saying, ‘but it has rarely attributed the ills of the world to their very existence. It needed Hilaire Belloc and Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, none of them native Britons, to introduce to English literature the programmatic hatred that ...”

“... to gather up the fragments of her identity, ‘as it had been in the beginning’. Like Merle, Frederic Raphael’s characters don’t act or feel much, but do an awful lot of talking, albeit after a fashion few of us would recognise. The ordinary functions of conversation are subsumed in bouts of gladiatorial articulacy. They don’t so much converse ...”

“... be a good novelist, though there are other, snootier survivors from the Fifties and Sixties, like Frederic Raphael, the Charterhouse toff, hatcheting this novel in the TLS, who see Storey as a semi-literate, who should have stuck to his 14-pound hammer and jockstraps. The end of Saville is more uplifting than most, concluding as it does with the ...”

“... prejudices, undistinguished even by his own high standards of unpleasantness. Hanging out with Frederic Raphael and Wolf Mankowitz at a literary festival, he writes: ‘They like to feel rootless, of course, because Jews want always to be pitied.’ Nathaniel Tarn, a poet, is described as ‘a European cocktail Jew’. Viewing a house he’s ...”

“... dreamer. The whole thing doesn’t quite take off, and ends up feeling like some lesser piece of Frederic Raphael university-and-after, not Colegate territory at all. Paul Bowles’s short stories concentrate almost entirely on sense of place, or at least of place dominating character and directing it. Bowles has lived for many years in Tangier, and ...”

“... on legal language and on Ronald Reagan’s speech-writer, a rant on modern television from Frederic Raphael, and views on editing (John Gross), Post-Structuralism (Alison Lurie) and computers. ‘Art’ in particular contains some notable essays, among them Walter Ong on subway graffiti, and the section opens with a splendidly passionate and ...”

“... seem to know that he’s in it or how to find the safest way out’), and wily buccaneers such as Frederic Raphael, who lashed ‘Atlas’s anthology of received opinions’ to the mast in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.* Zachary Leader, formerly the biographer of Kingsley Amis, prudently avoided such horn toots of hubris in the amassing of his ...”

“... the absence of genuine attempts at appraisal. The ‘superprice’ of $2,500,000 paid recently for Frederic Church’s Icebergs, a prime example of ‘Luminism’, when it was put up for auction by the Manchester convalescent home where it had long hung unadmired, seems to be enough to convince people of the picture’s superlative merits. For less than twice ...”

“... of Life (1857), replete with draped, earnest males, nude, lubricious females and deferences to Raphael, amused Queen Victoria. Kingsley is not however concerned with later ‘pictorialist’ photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz or F. Holland Day, who worked at the 20th century’s turn: still less with the 20th-century photographic mainstream, with its ...”

“... habit of the art historian’. The format was also familiar from engravings and copies of Raphael’s paintings (especially the Madonna della Sedia) and had been adopted in famous paintings by Thomas Lawrence and Ingres. Moreover, the style of Brown’s painting owes nothing to Botticelli. It does, however, owe something to the example of Van Eyck’s ...”

“... It’s​ not hard to think of painters who took up sculpture: Raphael (probably), Guido Reni (at least once), Frederic Leighton, Degas, Renoir (unfortunately), Picasso. But sculptors have less frequently turned to painting, which may explain why many art historians have found it so difficult to believe that the Florentine sculptor and goldsmith Andrea Verrocchio (1435-88) took up painting relatively late in his career and then abandoned it on recognising the extraordinary ability of his pupil Leonardo ...”