“... country, pines for the specious distractions of the big smoke: ‘The whole point,’ the scholar Philip Drew maintained, ‘is that the contrasts drawn by the speaker, with his exaggerated ideas of savoir vivre, are all reversed by the reader.’ But you don’t need independently to know about Browning’s love for a bustling urban scene to realise that ...”

“... Charlus’s mixture of preciousness and pomposity emerges in one word when he is offered a glass of orangeade at the Verdurin salon and expresses a preference for sa voisine, the raspberry cordial. Reading Proust in English, I had frequently gone straight over a scene between Swann and Dr Cottard until I happened to open it at that page in the ...”

“... Girls, which featured an interview with a 21-year-old woman who had had 789 lovers. ‘Prince Philip, Mary Whitehouse, Lord Hailsham and Brigid Brophy were all quoted on what they thought about the subject.’ The only sex-related subject not permitted in the paper was homosexuality. Murdoch was against it: ‘Do you really think the readers are ...”

“... as a reminder of the Kingsley Amis who once unambiguously remarked, in the course of a berating of Philip Roth, that ‘Jewish jokes are not funny.’ Then there is the woman question, which arises in the novel in a fashion which sets us wondering, as in the past and as in the case of the above encounter, which parts of the bad behaviour on display Amis quite ...”

“... underestimate the tenacity of cultural stereotypes and the stale-mindedness of press writers like Philip Hensher (who twice rehashed Leavis’s line that the ‘set’ were not artists but self-publicists) and Waldemar Januszczak (‘Bloomsbury. Just tapping out these ten tedious letters has brought on a severe attack of RSI’). Yet in truth – to throw off ...”

“... of Hever grounds so effectively that it was supposed his middle name was Walled-Off. There was Sir Philip Sassoon, the homosexual politician who added a bachelors’ wing to Port Lympne around a Moorish courtyard which Honor Channon likened to a Moorish brothel. And there was Lord Charles Beresford, on a country-house weekend, bursting into a darkened bedroom ...”

“... of the diary. The scenes of the mathematicians’ conference in Vienna were to be shot through glass, a film technique adapted for tape. After a week’s rehearsal in March 1979 I began to think that this was, potentially at least, a far better play than a short story. It had a resonance and life that had not been present previously. The relationships ...”

“... things to Nature and the whole’, to Peter Stillman, in Paul Auster’s City of Glass, crazedly attempting to re-create prelapsarian speech. Olson, it is often pointed out, is the first poet to have described himself as ‘Post-Modern’. That was in 1952. Five years before that he published his first book, Call Me Ishmael, an ...”

“... which was wholly invisible and untouchable’. At the end of a long day’s work, Hackett muses, glass of Scotch in hand, that ‘the way you feel about stories sometimes. It’s – well, sort of divine.’ The story ‘comes bubbling out of us like music’. ‘When I go knocking out the wordage and really get interested in my characters,’ he ...”

“... completely changed but I’m trying to keep it as normal as poss at the same time.”’ Phil – Philip Schofield – has long experience in identifying the normal and giving it the national thumbs-up. ‘You’re family now,’ he said, and Mrs Hinch beamed. Aw, babes. For Mrs Hinch, it’s all gone mega. Twenty-nine years old and until recently a ...”

“... as ‘a deliberate effort to use air power as an instrument of massacre and terrorism’. For Philip Noel-Baker, MP and peace activist, the precedent was ‘extremely dangerous to us and to the world . . . such methods will come to be regarded as accepted practice, which all too probably would be the starting point for the next war.’ Anxious citizens ...”

“... were licensed sponges. Moreover, we would lose voices like Dickens’s, Sylvia Plath’s and Philip Roth’s if their pillaged intimates had the right of censorship. Scott did publish some of Zelda’s stories under his own name, as Milford showed, but they might not otherwise have been published at all. Zelda’s achievement as a writer is not ...”

“... Britain’; there had been ‘nothing like it since Inigo Jones’. The great American modernist Philip Johnson praised its ‘distinction’ in the Architectural Review. Local people disliked it, possibly because, as the Smithsons thought, they were unsophisticated but without doubt because the combination of ...”

“... this painful episode with the following sentence: ‘On the window of Jerry’s bedroom, where the glass is dusty, I write, with my finger, the name of the child we had talked about: BINT.’ It does not require a particularly sceptical turn of mind to suppose that, had Maynard experienced a similar affair with a less famous man, her emotional wounds might not ...”

“... of the marital camera. This was true; Vonnegut eventually returned. Lunch inside the house at a glass table, the throne-like chairs used in a scene in Ben Hur: four were made for the movie, which Vidal helped script – uncredited, he said – and he had two more made for his dining-room. As I sat down, opposite Vidal and next to Auster, I accidentally ...”