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“... McGahern adds: ‘There were worse things in these nights than words.’ The father’s hands ‘drew him closer. They began to move in caress on the back, shoving up the nightshirt, downwards lightly to the thighs and heavily up again, the voice echoing rhythmically the movement of the hands.’That autumn, when McGahern returned to the school where he had ...”

“... by Waller, who famously squandered his great gifts as a songwriter). To make a living, however, he drew on a comedic side further stimulated and loosened by the alcoholism that had set in by his mid-twenties. Waller’s destiny as a jazz entertainer was determined by the successful 1932-34 run of his own radio show Fats Waller’s Rhythm Club on WLW, a ...”

“... or hangers-on. Both men were on horseback. They met near a stream. Without warning, naughty Fateh drew his sword, and with a single superbly executed blow, severed his older brother’s head from his body. The mare on which the slain man was riding galloped back with the decapitated body to the stables on his estate. The feud started there. The widow ...”

“... in mind – feature in practically every round-up of suspects: figures such as Clement Greenberg, Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling. But outdoing them all in his credentials for the title-role is Wilson, the freelance writer who never held a regular academic position and who, it is claimed, wrote authoritatively on questions of literature, culture and ...”

“... you are not passionately interested in,’ she said to Arbus. She had trained as a painter. ‘We drew from the models,’ she said, ‘and you cannot imagine how fantastically boring it can be to look hour after hour at a beautiful body. But an ugly body can be fascinating.’ Since Arbus was uncertain and afraid, Model encouraged her to use her ...”

“... naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the monumental ruggedness of his face, its deep furrows like plough marks crossing a field’. Probably the most beautiful and attentive drawing had been done five years earlier by David Hockney, in ...”

“... His relations with Trilling were cordial, but he found him ‘an impenetrable egoist’ and drew closer to the radical literary critic Fred Dupee, a founding editor of Partisan Review. In his early literary journalism, Said marked his distance from the Cold War moralism of the New York intellectuals as well as from the conservative formalism of the New ...”

“... I was God.’ Once a god, always a god? And yet always a reviser. On other days he can sound like Philip Larkin. Were there two Lowells, or only one? Lowell employed the term ‘dual personality’, a term which belongs to literature, and which also belongs to 19th-century medicine. The meaning of the term has remained uncertain: but it is certain that ...”

“... a certain point he seems never to have spoken or responded to language again), he drew constantly, producing large, hypnotic images on brown paper bags or donated rolls of examining-table paper of the type you see in doctors’ surgeries. His characteristic subjects include arid Mexican landscapes and hills (often with train tunnels and trains ...”

“... bordering on ‘minstrelsy’, contrasted sharply with the work of Bellow and Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, who had ‘not shown a great interest in the shadow of the Shoah’.A strenuously willed affiliation with the Shoah has also marked and diminished much American journalism about Israel. More consequentially, the secular-political religion of the ...”

“... face, and then dogged him with stealthy footsteps, passing and repassing him many times.’ Wilde drew on many sources as well as Stevenson for his novel. He took the motif of the portrait from his own great-uncle Charles Maturin’s novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). He also added his own version of the Faustian pact to an Irish legend, the story of ‘Tír ...”

“... of Vietminh strongholds in the South. US General John ‘Iron Mike’ O’Daniel instead drew up his own plan for a mobile force to attack the Vietminh in the North. With no great enthusiasm Navarre went along with it. Informed of what O’Daniel called the ‘Navarre Plan’ to win the war, Congress approved a further $385 million to pay for ...”

“... help with Harry Potter.3 But both Ursula le Guin (in her great Earthsea trilogy, 1968-73) and Philip Pullman (in his trilogy, His Dark Materials, 1995-2000) developed evocative and consistent naming systems for their imagined worlds without going on and on about it. Of course Iorek Byrnison, one of the armoured bears in Pullman, is linguistically ...”

“... much she could have said to them, but she had met T.S. Eliot, too, and there was Priestley and Philip Larkin and even Ted Hughes, to whom she’d taken a bit of a shine but who remained nonplussed in her presence. And it was because she had at that time read so little of what they had written that she could not find anything to say and they, of course, had ...”

“... beyond the common markets in which post-modernism can flourish. Early in 1991, Tatyana Tolstaya drew attention to such a region in western Eurasia not far beyond Europe: ‘in the West the sense of history has weakened or completely vanished; the West does not live in history, it lives in civilisation (by which I mean the self-awareness of transnational ...”