“... it all about?” the man complained to his wife. “Why, George,” she said, “it’s about love and hate and passion and everything – ever since the world began.” “Well,” the man said, “there must be more to it than that.” ’ George was right. There was more to it than that. On the eve of the dress rehearsal the hitherto compliant Kazan ...”

“... limbs are splayed out with flapperish elegance. It may be that her attractions – a fat bundle of love-letters was destroyed when she died, and Mrs Colenbrander finds several witnesses to testify to her ‘aura’ – had less to do with ideal beauty than with loquaciousness and flair. She published more than thirty books,* and was praised for her ...”

“... He denies any particular bias against Labour governments, and is sorry to have fallen out with Harold Wilson (who later expressed sadness that he hadn’t known Pincher was a fellow Yorkshireman, telling him: ‘It would have made a difference, you know’). But while it may be true that he needled Tory as well as Labour administrations, provoking ...”

“... Lucas and five of the Blake plates reproduced. The other modern edition I acquired was called The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, and had a biographical preface by Roger Ingpen. It was a reprint of Mary’s letters to her lover Gilbert Imlay, first published by Godwin among her posthumous works, and then by Kegan Paul in 1879. Ingpen wrote of her life ...”

“... recounted were haunted, not only by the shared grind of poverty, but by private images of loss and love. There was a political edge to those novels, emerging as they did from the feminist Left, but what drove them was a long engagement with moments of vision, bleakly Wordsworthian spots of time that recur again and again in her fiction. Barker’s first four ...”

“... to buy books only to discover that everything that wasn’t a copy of Jaws was by Jackie Collins, Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon, or Danielle Steel. I noted this cultural deficit in my compendium of things to complain about to God but I read The Bitch myself on the way home and remember a very fruity passage in which the heroine, a woman who owned a disco ...”

“... subjects: the Ricketts, Woods and Gudger families. Sometimes, against his declared purpose, his love overwhelms these people with words and will not let them breathe. The self-depreciating asides (on a middle-class writer’s privilege and complicity) are only a little dated and anyway in line with expectations of this form of pastoral, but they sink the ...”

“... William Styron and Sainte-Beuve, is conspicuously silent about Flaubert and seems to have a love-hate relationship with Nabokov. He delights in summoning up his rhetoric of loathing for the Nazis and the Mafia and in distilling hard, frequently paradoxical conclusions from his insights. ‘Cowards are dangerous,’ he hisses in a review of Gitta ...”

“... Oprah has been wallowing in for 25 years. The two of them were made for each other, with their love of confession and ‘personal revelations’. Each, in her own lucrative way, has coarsened the public’s understanding of real pain, corrupted the meaning of self-respect and annihilated reticence, and it all keeps the tills ringing, the audiences ...”

“... closeted editorial assistant who works with him at a literary quarterly in Manhattan. Jack is in love with Will, but his ardent affection and oversized penis fail to bend Will’s heterosexuality. Jack holds out hope that Will’s novel may betray affection for him, or at least an openness to sexual experimentation. Novelists, Jack believes, are under a ...”

“... like everybody else I did my best to look as innocent as possible.’Lewis writes that Neapolitans love food more than life itself, but in 1944 this was not only true of Neapolitans. Since there was so little of it, food was the most popular topic of conversation in Rome. People no longer fitted into their clothes because they had lost so much weight; many ...”

“... only with a deathless ‘ – stayed the night.’ Very occasionally he will rise to ‘we made love.’ Wyman comes across as someone who not only always checks the bill but keeps his own slate too in case there’s a dispute: ‘a girl who had stayed with me ... on tour in Denmark in June 1965 contacted the Stones office ... saying she had just given ...”

“... the progress of their romance in her diary, but when they meet, and Algernon falls instantly in love as planned, Cecily won’t let him read it: ‘Oh no. You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.’ Cecily’s ...”

“... close quarters with access to actual trees and picnic grounds for gulps of fresh air, whereas free love in Greenwich Village or some San Francisco beatnik pad was sordid and itchy. Post-Pill (oral contraceptives became available in 1960), marriage was no longer a sealed coffin, a death-do-us-part pact; there were escape hatches, diversionary manoeuvres. Of ...”

“... before he shot the top of his own head off, Americans had begun to wonder whether they had come to love Hemingway not wisely but too well. This suspicion had little to do with his stories and novels: it was the fiction that Hemingway and others had made of his life that held the attention – the text of the man, not of his art. As the writer and war ...”