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“... master plan. Born in 1874, Maugham lived to be almost 92 and published 20 novels, eight short story collections, five travel books, nine books of essays and three memoirs. In addition, he wrote 29 plays and translated three more from Italian and French. Ashenden says that ‘posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a ...”

“... Philip Larkin met Monica Jones in 1946 at Leicester University College. She was an assistant lecturer there, and Larkin was an assistant librarian. Both had firsts in English from Oxford. Monica Jones was an able lecturer, but she never published anything and so was never promoted, although she stayed at Leicester until she retired in 1981 ...”

“... Holt, her friend and literary executor, has also added to it parts of three other novels and some short stories. When this hoard from the bottom drawer is put alongside the nine books published during Pym’s lifetime and the autobiographical material assembled by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym in A Very Private Life (1984), the picture that emerges is certainly ...”

“... that our governments are systematically covering up the evidence – Occam’s razor makes pretty short work of it.A growing number of people can’t see the problem. According to the latest YouGov polling, 34 per cent of Americans and 22 per cent of Britons believe that extra-terrestrial beings have visited Earth. Not all of them are obvious cranks. Greg ...”

“... full-page promotional ads approving quotes from Tate, Stevens, MacNeice, R.P. Blackmur, Ransom, Philip Rahv, Auden, Mark Van Doren, Philip Wheelwright and Dudley Fitts. The ‘American Auden’ label that was to haunt him later in life as the most damning evidence of his unfulfilled promise was in fact part of the New ...”

“... of ‘People of the Black Mountains’, his uncompleted ‘historical novel’. There are 17 short stories or sketches, rather dismal slices of life in south-eastern Wales, between the Wye and the Usk: they are set in six different centuries, from AD 82 to 1415. There is a thin linking narrative about a youth in the 1980s who meditates on the history of ...”

“... Casting himself as a ‘little helpless child’, Gosse represented his father, the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, as a small-minded bigot. In Edmund’s case, the not uncommon inclination to see ourselves as pitiful victims when we remember our childhood was magnified by the wish to imply a heroic escape from the tyranny of an eminent Victorian. Even ...”

“... violence had been a symptom of a repressed inner rage. But ‘self-acceptance had to stop short of sinking into mundane serenity,’ Soden writes. ‘Acceptance came in embracing life’s troubles as necessary for creative work.’The first performance of A Child of Our Time had to wait until Tippett had suffered the consequences of being a pacifist ...”

“... a number of historians have modified the picture of a collapse which was confined to the French. Philip Warner, in an incisive piece of writing, equates the fate of the Dutch, Belgian, British and French armies as they were all confounded by German boldness and ruthlessness. He shows how it was not only the French but also the British who had assumed that ...”

“... the Sovereign’s second choice, a useful consideration to be kept in mind should things go wrong. Philip Larkin had already given the honour a (possibly reluctant) thumbs-down: he was very ill. If there were question marks about Ted Hughes, they would have been to do with his reputation as a rebarbative cave-dwelling type, and as a connoisseur of bestial ...”

“... signalled by a studied disdain for the conventions of realism (‘Here you are to imagine a short scene of family jubilation, I’m buggered if I can describe one’), along with some suitably cryptic allusions and some asides about the inadvisability of hope. Coe’s attempts to imitate the master’s way with cliché don’t really come off – he ...”

“... At​ the centre of a wide shot, near the centre of the film, stands Philip Seymour Hoffman: scruffy, genial, large, mildly enigmatic. He is in a city park, trees all around him, leaves beneath his feet. He is waiting for something, or watching for something. An abduction performed by members of his team, as it happens ...”

“... insistent style of Raphael’s narration and by the one-sidedness of his interests. On Byron’s short-lived and disastrous marriage to Annabella Milbanke, Raphael is in his element, as a sharp-eyed, sympathetic and worldly eavesdropper on a series of bedroom scenes. When he takes the story on to Switzerland, where Byron reluctantly resumed his affair with ...”

“... and break and build and break again. Something of the way they work can be observed even in a short passage, such as the following, taken pretty much at random, from American Pastoral: He had the talent for it, had what it took to avoid anything disjointed, anything special, anything improper, anything difficult to assess or understand. And yet not even ...”

“... This short film is an experiment designed to use the medium of the screen to create for the eye an impression comparable to that experienced by the ear.’ While the caption scrolls upwards, a soprano sings from Karol Szymanowski’s Słopiewnie cycle. This is The Eye and the Ear (1944), produced by the Polish Film Unit, which operated out of London in the later years of the war ...”