“... myth – one we can still half assent to while half persuaded by the black, reductive alternative. Frank Kermode, while studying the mythopoeic patterns of The Spire, is surely right about the importance for that novel of a particular place, Salisbury, and a particular trade: ‘I don’t know exactly where he got the facts about the mason’s ...”

“... In Motherless Brooklyn (1999), four Brooklyn orphans are taken up by a low-level crook called Frank Minna, who runs a detective agency. Frank is then murdered, leaving the orphans to find out what happened to him. The style is hardboiled, the pace unflagging, the plot bewildering; yet this isn’t an ordinary detective ...”

“... Cliffside Park, the next town south from Fort Lee. My folks went there quite often because it was close by and the food was good. That is, until my mother, who is given to irrepressible asides about people’s appearance and speculation about their personal lives, remarked to my father one evening at Duke’s: ‘How old could that little blonde number be ...”

“... certain vulnerability that makes it easy for enemies, or even friends, to hurt him. Auden, a very close friend, never really gave up his undergraduate practice of saying wounding things, largely because he rarely changed his view of anybody, and Spender was always for him the naive, crazy young Oxford poet, a sort of holy fool for whom he felt some respect ...”

“... the end of that period. Bennett’s income, roughly translated into modern money, was sometimes close to a million a year, and Wells, Galsworthy and Kipling cannot have been far behind. Yet there was also a line of writers who seemed unable to tap this wealth – Gissing, Meredith, Conrad, Ford. Between The Secret Agent and Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks, both ...”

“... Bakhtin was not referred to by name). However, early drafts have been found in the files of a close friend of Bakhtin’s, and the text, as yet unpublished, has been reconstructed by a Canadian scholar. A planned edition of Bakhtin’s complete works has begun with the mysterious appearance of Volume V, in keeping with the erratic history of the ...”

“... The Barracks (1963), The Dark (1965) – and in some of his best short stories. ‘Gugering,’ Frank Shovlin explains in a footnote, ‘is the act of dropping seed potatoes into holes in the ground.’ Uncle Pat, he suggests, is a model for the fictional character ‘The Shah’ in McGahern’s final novel, That They Might Face the Rising Sun ...”

“... labour swim against the tide And spend her strength with over-matching waves. His enemies then close in, and after a lengthy bout of mutual insult, kill him. To a modern ear this report of a military disaster surely sounds inept – absurdly lazy, inappositely languid, undistressed, unafraid. It puzzles us that in his extremity Richard goes in for elegant ...”

“... death – depicts his alcohol-fuelled degeneration without sentimentality: it’s a sensitive and frank homage to a friend. By comparison his tall, slender canvas of Baroness Varvara Ikskul von Hildenbandt, looking indifferently out at the spectator from behind her veil, is an exquisite fashion plate of aristocratic Russian chic that would be equally at home ...”

“... to the lower middle class, and lived over their small dairy business in a slum area. He grew up close to the kind of people whose talk has been immortalised by Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan. Indeed, Andrews claims that Fluther Good in O’Casey’s Plough and the Stars was once employed in their dairy. In this ‘most pathetic and apathetic city in ...”

“... a real historical personage) of the first great Polish chrestomathy, New Athens (from which Jacob Frank will learn his Polish), a chapbook of the most interesting thoughts and sayings of the past, to which he has decided to add the wisdom of the Jews, so far closed to him. The learned rabbi, Elisha Shorr, to whom Father Chmielowski proposes an exchange of ...”

“... not only him but the Home Rule cause of the moral dignity he had battled to assert, and, as Frank Callanan notes, delivered to Unionist enemies the propaganda gift of an apparent reversion to the old, burlesque Ireland, the pantomimic Paddyism, of their most cherished prejudices, an image only intensified by Davitt’s snivelling exculpation of the ...”

“... three hundred dollars from him to cover the cost of the procedure. She returned from her ordeal close to collapse, blaming him for every humiliating detail of the experience. She had kept her side of the bargain and he kept his by marrying her. Later she claimed she had never been pregnant. How was that possible? He had seen the results of her urine test at ...”

“... an old man in a wheelchair, seen from the back. The camera circles round him and pauses in the air close to his face – too close for any plausible human view. Martin Scorsese – this is the opening scene of his new film The Irishman – likes this kind of shot. At the beginning of The Age of Innocence (1993) the camera ...”