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“... like a dead fish oozing ‘its fluid genital trash’ – which is why he is worth reading at all. Harry Smart, in his second book of poems, Shoah, wants to see very large things – like the Holocaust, or the fate of contemporary Germany – and so writes a verse of regal vacancy, elevated but unstocked. His verse moves in an expensive chamber of ...”

“... acceptable violence, the violence that the mildest of us used to hanker for. It’s not that Dirty Harry, say, had a heart; we never thought of him as our friend. But he had a mind and a history; his violent proceedings invited questions even as they offered answers we didn’t want to hear. Eastwood, in fact, as the most bankable and enduring Hollywood star ...”

“... third and latest, takes place in Brewster, Pennsylvania, from June 1979 into 1980. Rabbit – as Harry Angstrom is still known to himself – runs a Toyota agency; his scene is now the country club, the golf course and the Bahamas on a wife-swapping holiday. The novel is effortlessly informing about time and place; about ...”

“... and I almost wish I hadn’t begun the thing.”’ Such was my experience with The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871). It revs up like a great novel, before driving off a narrative cliff. Yet by the end I still felt I had read something significant. So what is Meredith up to when he isn’t telling a story?Let’s go back to the beginning. It is the middle ...”

“... In 1973, the American writer Harry Mathews, who was then in his mid-forties, was living in Paris. He had been divorced by his first wife, Niki de Saint Phalle; the editor Maxine Groffsky, with whom he had spent the last 12 years, had recently left him to go back to New York; his two children had also gone. It was, he later wrote, a time when his life was ‘at an ebb, professionally and privately ...”

“... Nato’s Visiting Forces Act; theoretically, in a time of war, we could be shot. I had first met Harry Pincus, the charismatic founder of our station, when we were both volunteer ‘barefoot doctors’ at R.D. Laing’s Kingsley Hall, a halfway house for psychotics in the East End. One night, when Harry was ambushed by a ...”

“... It’s hard to imagine anyone settling down to write the further adventures of that Harry Potter of the 1830s, Tom Brown; even harder to imagine anyone settling down to read them. (Thomas Hughes did in fact write a sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, but it’s never done as well as Tom Brown’s Schooldays: Amazon.co.uk hasn’t even heard of it ...”

“... be cool and American was a gift; every soldier headed to Normandy with a dream of being brave, a smart looker on his arm. Rewatching these films today, we may wonder how aware Bogart and Bacall were of what they were up to. Call it art or propaganda – but for a time the two of them fell for it, as if they were watching their own movie. The best film stars ...”

“... strangeness as if the artist had no idea of what he was revealing; Duchamp strikes me as too smart for that. His enigmatic titles are said to secure him ‘in some invisible, private space’. But Duchamp’s comment – that they created ‘the possibility to invent a theme for the paintings, afterwards’ – looks acceptable enough. An enigma need not ...”

“... and a needling hotelier called Andy Bragg. Crystal, Tommy’s cosmetically enhanced, street-smart wife, has a past she’d prefer to keep secret; her stepson, Harry, is a thoughtful boy fond of puns involving cheese. Two young female police detectives entertainingly called Ronnie and Reggie are interviewing in the ...”

“... the children.Injury Time isn’t the sort of novel that anyone writes these days: 150 pages of smart, efficient prose; characters and situation ruthlessly developed and then as ruthlessly discarded. Enormous skill is expended on a construction that builds rapid momentum, is packed with vitality, and then is abruptly over and done, roaring off into a chilly ...”

“... scheme. Belgrave Road was not a great success. Victoria was too far off the beaten track of the smart set, so she moved to South Audley Street, Mayfair, in 1934. Already, according to Vogue, ‘one of the essential figures behind the scenes of social life’, Spry now stepped into the limelight. In 1935 she got her first royal commission, for the wedding of ...”

“... queen, has been murdered. Agent Cooper – effortlessly dapper, crisply handsome, intimidatingly smart – is called in to investigate. He is assisted by the local sheriff, Harry S. Truman (as Cooper tells his Dictaphone, ‘shouldn’t be too hard to remember that’). It doesn’t take long for the scab of small-town ...”

“... arched ecstatically back as he anticipates his flight. He is wearing a suit and tie, a pair of smart shoes. A cyclist on the other side of the street pedals on, unaware or uninterested. One is left to imagine what comes next: lift-off, the artist transcendent; or the beginning of the descent, the man smacking down onto the tarmac below. As it ...”

“... Letters’ section of that earlier book, just as Dog Years reprised characters from The Tin Drum. Harry Liebenau and Jenny Brunies reappear. So, above all, does Tulla Pokriefke, the recipient of cousin Harry’s love letters, last met with in Dog Years as a teenage tram conductor who had just suffered a miscarriage; here ...”