“... In April​ 1973, on a Pan Am 747 jumbo jet from London to LA, I took my seat in the upstairs dining room opposite a Cincinnati salesman and his wife. He sold screws – really. Just as improbably, I had sold my first novel to the movies. The tablecloth, the silverware, the crystal wine glasses, the Chateaubriand being carved in front of us at five hundred miles an hour felt extraordinary, a swank unreality that matched my elevated mood ...”

“... out of it a little too well. The parents were townspeople, the father a bank manager whose work took him from Algiers to Marseille to Lyon; the grandparents, on the other hand, were out-and-out country people, with a family name to prove it: Berger. Grandfather Berger was a forester who retired to a village in the Morvan and there inducted the boy Althusser ...”

“... for work and power of mind, combined with Victoria’s frequent pregnancies, meant that he soon took effective charge of royal affairs. He often dealt with politicians directly, was always present when the Queen saw her ministers, drafted most of Victoria’s letters and memoranda, guided her in the formulation of all of her opinions, and became in ...”

“... pseudonyms of George G. Gilman, Charles R. Pike, Thomas H. Stone. Like his compatriots ‘John G. MeLaglen’ and J.T. Edson, Harknett has ‘appreciation societies’ devoted to his pseudonymous personae. (‘J.T.’, incidentally, the biggest seller of them all, claims his name is genuine. It’s a happy accident.) Multiple pseudonymy as a device of ...”

“... the wake of the couple’s acrimonious separation. Byron’s side of the story went up in smoke in John Murray’s grate when the poet’s publisher presided over the burning of his memoirs. If we want Byron’s relationships with those who knew him, why should we not just read his often wonderful letters? One answer might be that Leslie Marchand’s 12-volume ...”

“... characters gratified another and a newer sort of audience. Yet it is possible to wonder if Osborne took a conscious tip or two from his predecessor’s play, which had then been running for nearly two years. Innes’s insight about resemblance did not come to him in the heat of the theatre but after the event: the audience at the Royal Court knew that the ...”

“... be. ‘Literary work’ in copyright law is thus a semantic convenience of the same order as ‘John Doe’: what it is all depends. The legal fiction that the literary work has an abstract, single existence which accompanies but mysteriously transcends any book fits in nicely with the academic theory of ‘text’. It is no accident that the century which ...”

“... Catalogue. The correction is welcome, but it raises as many questions as it answers. The source I took was Who’s Who, where Kennard herself for over twenty years publicly claimed to be Laing’s daughter. Why? Presumably whoever wrote the Companion entry knows, but didn’t have space enough to do more than put the record straight as to paternity. Here and ...”

“... that the Regius Professor of Medicine said that at his age it was bad for the health. So Beauty took all and the Beast got nothing? That would at least have had some punch as a fiction, for Trollope perhaps, or even for James himself. But again reality was more blurred, more commonplace. The two upset each other, lived apart, tried to live together ...”

“... this wasn’t the message the Reagan administration wanted to hear and he was quickly replaced by John Negroponte, a conservative hardliner. Negroponte began to consolidate Honduras as a client state of the US and the base from which the Contra war against Nicaragua was directed. When he became ambassador, US military assistance to Honduras was four million ...”

“... in particle physics at Yaroslavl University. At first he held me at a courteous distance as we took the crowded bus through the centre, across the industrial district and out to the vast suburb, built up since the late Fifties, where he lives with the rest of the family: Tanya, his wife, an administrator at the University; her father Nikolai, a retired ...”

“... indicates the sense in which the erotic is highly important in her own art. Unlike Virginia she took quite naturally to the new style of frankness, the verbal and frequently physical promiscuity which had become a Bloomsbury moral principle. In Those Barren Leaves Aldous Huxley portrays one of the girls of the period, who absurdly combines innocence with ...”

“... At college I took a class in writing short stories. It’s a long time ago, but it stands out among the things that were happening to me at the time; and have happened, or not happened, since. The instructor always wanted us to be dry and precise. No gush please was his watchword. I was feeling pretty dry myself, so I thought I should be able to manage that ...”

“... There had also been calls from these phones near the site of the kidnapping in the weeks before it took place (there were signs that the area had been staked out). This complicated phone trail eventually led to a man called Robert Lady. Lady was the CIA’s man in Milan, formally a US vice-consul, but well known to the police as a spy. He was so in love with ...”

“... it easier to swim all the way from the Lido to Venice and up the Grand Canal to his palazzo; and took pride in the fact that he was then still quite hale enough to eat a ‘piece’ and retire to bed with Boccaccio and ‘a black-eyed Venetian girl’. On that occasion he had been competing in the swim with a bachelor friend, Alexander Scott, and the ...”