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“... a swollen head,’ the Fleet Street veteran A.G. Gardiner wrote in his memoirs. He must have had W.T. Stead especially in mind, because no editorial head was bigger than Stead’s. In the 1880s, first as deputy editor then editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, he’d been able (he said) to ‘wreck cabinets [and] let loose a tide of war upon helpless ...”

“... still searching for an English publisher), Richard Schickel’s D. W. Griffith and now David Robinson’s Chaplin. All have one vital quality in common, and are preceded in this respect by Alexander Walker’s book on Garbo: they depend far less upon books of film history than upon first-class and first-hand research. Instead of a furtive glance at Terry ...”

“... sloshing flood of time and space’. From the perspective of a smart garden party overlooking Sydney harbour, the line separating order (of which Hospital disapproves, because it’s authoritarian) from chaos (of which she approves, because it’s human) is called sharply into question: ‘Where else,’ her narrator asks, ‘is the membrane between ...”

“... a writer whose approach is so painterly. Then, of course, there is the problem of Australia. ‘We’re so cripplingly laconic,’ he says, clinging to the place in spite of its constraints. But perhaps the biggest problem remains the writer’s self that can never quite be abolished. Bail’s early London diaries, published as Longhand: A Writer’s ...”

“... of the Heart.* (The other, and for some readers the even finer novel, was The Last September.) If we again open it and read its first two pages to peer through the first wisps of its smoke of battle in search of the central theme, it is there as plain as an opened diary. The ‘catch’ is, as old lovers of this poignant, funny, passionate story will at once ...”

“... and rigidity, and there is a Catalan word for it: seny. This untranslatable term means, we are told, something like common sense, or the spirit of compromise, but it is also rendered as wisdom and intelligence, and Temma Kaplan associates it with solidarity. ‘The man of seny,’ we learn from a Catalan writer ...”

“... slave trade’, fictional and factual. The journalist who did most to establish the genre was W.T. Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette. In 1885 he exposed the extent of child prostitution in London in a multi-part investigation, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’. ‘Is it or is it not a fact,’ he asked an experienced police officer, ‘that, at this ...”

“... were just thrown into heaps near the camps.     Aunt and Grandma gathered the tins, then we would gather bushes, scrub and sticks, spread them onto the ground, and pile the tins on top. A pile would be left for a few days until the bushes and scrub, which were mostly green, dried enough to burn. Then we would come ...”

“... transformation while sedulously avoiding the style of unrestrained ‘magic realism’ that we have come to expect of Latin American novels. ‘It was so easy to imitate Garcia Marquez, and everyone was doing it,’ the narrator remarks of the mourners gathered at the Nerudas’ house: but the scene from which this comment is taken is less reminiscent ...”

“... as ‘Obj.’ (objectionable). The richer by £200, he then followed his father into the Church. We would do well to remember the Reverend John Smith in a year which sees the first publication in paperback of the work on which he did the initial drudgery. This entire version, infinitely corrected, is the transcription first published in 1971 by R.C. Latham ...”

“... other people’s needs before my own,’ he said. ‘When I left that hideous job I got a sense we were all interconnected. Freeganism tries to connect with people’s needs – putting community first. In 2002, I decided to devote my life to getting the message out and living as sincerely as possible. Instead of using money and all that I wanted to tread ...”

“... a man’s job. 8 January. By train to Cambridge on a day of blinding sunshine and bitter cold. We eat our sandwiches on the train, a busy, bucketing electric job that scampers through Shepreth and Foxton and very different from the plodding little steam train I used to take into Cambridge when I was doing National Service. These days, the populousness of ...”