“... now somewhat ancient,’ he fretted, ‘one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass.’ But the lure of political advancement was too great. As the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth I’s second most important adviser, and the nephew of Lord Burghley, her chief counsellor, he had been born to the purple. But he was the youngest of five ...”

“... later, Wallace is no longer with us, but two of the Great Male Narcissists he cited, Updike and Philip Roth, are still displaying their self-absorbency and depriving tender young empaths of valuable column inches. With an almost audible sigh, Updike concedes that the pups have a point. ‘He or she may feel, as the grey-haired scribes of the day continue to ...”

“... glimpse into Greene’s life – these and the books she once handled, presented in spotlit glass cases. But luckily we have Greene’s private letters, which reveal another secret life she was careful to keep hidden. In January 1909 she was introduced to the art historian Bernard Berenson. By April he had sent her sixteen volumes of The Thousand and ...”

“... home: ‘glossy tiles in a brighter shade of white’, ‘modern and functional furniture’, a glass coffee pot, a fireplace with fake logs, vases placed on doilies, nesting tables. This is where the nouveau roman influence ends. The woman of the title has left her husband and tells her neighbour Marie: ‘I’m free … I have visitors, they give me ...”

“... in the precise pejorative sense used by Shakespeare in King Lear: ‘Get thee glass eyes,/And, like a scurvy politician, seem/To see the things thou dost not.’ So while the message of these texts is clear enough, their provenance makes them hard to interpret. The proportion of truth and invention in them cannot be gauged. Did Marlowe ...”

“... now looks suspiciously like a one-man tradition. So standard an item in recent collections has the Philip Larkin Memorial Poem become that it now exists as a genre in its own right, like the limerick and the villanelle. Thus Ewart again:                             For us, he’s gonemuch loved, humane; that shyly gloomy ...”

“... for our shortcomings. Even the restless, selfish Wilmet, eventually recognises that life is ‘a glass of blessings’ – the title of the novel she appears in. (The quotation is borrowed from George Herbert, one of Pym’s favourite poets.) Gently mocking self-love, Pym’s novels find redemption in commonplace pleasures – though without ...”

“... terms of a novelette,’ but in straight narrative, too, he often produced such sentences as: ‘Philip listened with all his ears, and though he felt a little out of it, his heart leapt with exultation. The time flew.’ ‘It can only be described in a hackneyed phrase, because it was a hackneyed thing’ was one justification, and hackneyed things turn up ...”

“... his own and suspect version of it, but he always turned against the end-product and its author. Philip Purser, for instance (‘Nosy Parker’ in Edward’s usual post-publication demonology), tried hard, in his short but entertaining The Extraordinary Worlds of Edward James (1978), to achieve detachment, but there is inevitably a feel of his subject’s ...”

“... to call them roller blades and to think of myself as a blade runner, someone who is waiting for a Philip K. Dick novel to happen in. Specifically, I now glide about in the faster and more graceful Rollerblade Coolblades. These have a moulded and vented polyurethane boot with ratchet fastenings and high-rebound, polyurethane, Kryptonic wheels with sealed ...”

“... he interviews an elderly private eye who may or may not be the original of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and who recounts an ostensibly real-life gangster episode which brought Chandler and the archetypal Marlowe together. Similarly the investigation of the Ellery Queen biographical tangle leads into a little ‘sealed room’ problem fortified by ...”

“... explained how ‘gloriously liberating’ he found the ‘scratch and sniff pictures’ of Philip Guston which ‘smelled of stale vodka and cigarettes, old spunk and dirty sheets’. Other artists were praised for shamelessly cocking their legs (De Chirico!) or for ‘drooling over fleshy naked women’ with a ‘quite shocking lack of ...”

“... can now only be done very artificially, when it constitutes a way of life summed up at the end of Philip Larkin’s sardonic poem as ‘reprehensibly perfect’. The natural thing today is to travel as if sitting in a room, an aeroplane or a car. Instant arrival leaves us sitting in another room, waiting for more drops, sprightly or otherwise, from the ...”

“... Her time working in a bar served her well: Riley is constantly attuned to the moment when the glass is about to fly. In publishing speak, her books are ‘slim and devastating’, which is the sort of epithet that would get an eye-roll from one of her narrators. Because they often play the bitch. It’s one of their endearing qualities.Riley is fluent in ...”

“... Demon Goes to Kill Death’, in Cathures, describes battlefields where the sand was fused to glass, And oil burned screaming along the waves, And shelled villages were smoking shells Or hells, though the shellers crowed to heaven. Morgan has strong feelings of solidarity with the war band, but he’s also rather taken with one of its enemies. Grendel is ...”