“... and see what happened, though his early books feel as if he did: he boasted that he could, when young, contain a whole novel in his head. Muriel Spark is said to sit down at her desk, take a clean piece of paper and begin, say, ‘Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark. Chapter One’, before she has thought further. Not so Waugh, who set about carrying out ...”

“... with the exception of the angelic figure in the curious drawing known as The Dreamer. A naked young man sprawls dreamily. In the air above there hovers – upside down, almost vertical, wings spread – a smaller and rather chubby naked figure, blowing a trumpet downwards in the direction of the sprawler’s ear. The overt iconography, Dr Liebert ...”

“... of an intermediary. (This surely was one function of his friendship with the ardent Schoenbergian Robert Craft – which Keller does not mention – a friendship which began three years before Schoenberg’s death.) Many perceptive observers will have taken it for granted that Webern acted as a kind of buffer between the two other composers, and will be ...”

“... in Chesterton’s prime. How often was I told over cocoa or mulled wine with devoutly disposed young men, that Savonarola said mass in a bowler, and that he would have done better to wear the conventional biretta? But from the same period I sufficiently recall the Gorgias to know that its author (by Chesterton so oddly bracketed with George ...”

“... caverns humming ... Spectre, spectre where If among these early places lie you, do you lie? The young poet seems unconsciously to have realised that ‘Modernism’ could as easily be suggested by language that sounded archaic, translated (‘Large lakes unreal’, ‘lie you, do you lie?’), as by the more conventional Modernist expedient of direct ...”

“... sight of something by the shore of the lake: turtles waddling in to end the story in the manner of Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ or Tobias Wolff’s ‘Poaching’: ‘They watch those turtles on their slow march and behold those ancient creatures, shell-backed and the colour of time, as they lower themselves, turtle upon turtle, disappearing into the ...”

“... of Fountain’s long apprenticeship is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping nerviness of Didion and ...”

“... believer than the secular intellectuals he sneered at? The evidence is inconclusive. Although as a young man he had considered ordination, the more the older Cowling obsessed over religion the less he seemed to be interested in Christianity as either transcendence or moral guide. Instead, like a plumber seeking the appropriate rod for unblocking a drain, he ...”

“... Robert Frost’s crack about free verse – that it’s tennis without a net – might be modified to describe Georges Perec’s novels: they’re tennis with nets everywhere. His whodunnit La Disparition (1969), a lipogram, was written without the use of the letter e (it was translated into e-less English as A Void by Gilbert Adair in 1994 ...”

“... the 19th-century novel itself is perhaps the most important. As Pew and Silver tell it, Robert Louis Stevenson visits Dark at the lighthouse and gets drunkenly loquacious on the subject of man’s shadowy inner self. When Dark discovers an evolutionist’s treasure trove of fossils, he becomes the embodiment of post-Darwinian angst, and Darwin ...”

“... father and a mother who worked as a maid at a hotel: ‘He needed fame, but how could one so young achieve this? If he could attach his dishonoured name to a new comet, his glory and synonymously his family glory would be rung over all Japan.’ Evidently comets have to be seen as a resource for humans, a resource which can be used in lots of different ...”

“... finding somewhere on the South Island a bit like ‘the Lake District’. The man who catches her, Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire and former CEO of a drone manufacturer, shuttles between disguises of his own: doomsday prepper, wannabe media baron, and, on occasion, an imaginary commanding officer at the CIA’s Special Operations Group called Lt Col ...”

“... of the attack, a covert campaign called Operation Wrath of God. Beginning with the shooting of a young Palestinian, Wael Zwaiter, as he walked up the stairs to his apartment in Rome, the hit team killed nine people over the course of the next two years. Some were gunned down in the street; others were dispatched by bombs planted in homes or cars. In July ...”

“... the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2004, joining first collections by Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass in a century-old series that still guarantees critical attention. But Crush was unusual in achieving not just critical acclaim but substantial popular success. Its hot-blooded, hallucinatory poems, set in a run-down, roadside-horror America, pursued ...”

“... of curiosity: historical, technical, geographical. The result falls short of the masterpiece that Robert Penn Warren hails on the jacket. It needs a bigger and better-stocked mind to carry the reader from one individually satisfying sketch to another over such a long span. But for a writer’s first published book it is a formidable achievement, combining the ...”