“... for the stage by the playwright Hugh Leonard, McGahern wrote to his US editor: ‘The tart’s name is Hugh Leonard, did Stephen D. once, and several cheap hits.’During these years, McGahern was writing his fourth novel, The Pornographer, in which the protagonist, a young man called Michael, makes a colonel and a woman called Mavis get up to all kinds of ...”

“... Holmes and Moriarty, in America centre-stage in the criminal drama was held by real people – by Billy the Kid or Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok or Wyatt Earp. The American public expected its lawmen to be colourful popular heroes and the boundary between crime fiction and non-fiction was tenuous indeed. Allen Pinkerton, the most famous detective of the 19th ...”

“... host to ‘male harpies’ luring decent heterosexual boys back to their flats. Pubs that get a name among the perverts are a recurrent problem – ‘these pests descend like locusts’ and ‘perverts in a mass are even more noisome than singly.’ Dunne is doing his duty but is perhaps rattled by his contact with brute facts, falling back instinctively ...”

“... Blacks and whites could save not only America but the world itself. By the time he published No Name in the Street in 1972, a book haunted by the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Baldwin had lost all hope in white Americans, the ‘sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any colour, to be found in the world ...”

“... from Stevenson’s parents, who were pleased to see him settled – he immediately changed its name to Skerryvore, after one of the family lighthouses. The house, a yellow brick construction with a blue slate roof, stood on a rise at 63 Alum Chine Road, with a gorge at the end of the garden that ran down to the sea. Stevenson looked from the top window and ...”

“... in the weeks after his death was taken in January 1997 at his 50th birthday celebrations, with Billy Corgan, Lou Reed and Robert Smith. This was the period when he finally found inner calm and displayed outer happiness, relaxed into himself. But take a look at this photo: doesn’t he look a bit wizened, a bit unreal, like a doll of himself or a plastic ...”

“... in the spirit of Disney, how-to kitsch and the rest of the postmodern paraphernalia around his name, to which Proustian scholars delight to allude with a complaisant wink.2 So too in moral sensibility, he gave his own expression to the inseparable couplet of the cynical and sentimental, perhaps the most common of all legacies of romanticism, from bohemian ...”

“... he starts speaking at you it’s like preachin,’ she said. North Carolina was the birthplace of Billy Graham and three US presidents, Andrew Johnson, James Polk and Andrew Jackson, and also, among the twinkling lights out there, you could find the uncelebrated birthplace of Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolinian who wrote Look Homeward, Angel. As the truck got ...”

“... of a white boy. T.Z. Cotton – the white press and courts of his day never managed to get his name right – was kidnapped from the same Muscogee County Courthouse where Brooks was tried, taken to the edge of town and, begging for his life, pumped full of bullets. Brewster Land, Judge Land’s father, was acquitted; none of those who witnessed the ...”

“... an opera for the Festival of Britain, Forster collaborated with Eric Crozier on the libretto of Billy Budd. That enterprise required him to work closely with the composer, which he did, though not without some friction; but this first-hand experience of writing words for music must have both drawn on and enhanced his musical interests. In a tribute to ...”

“... futile suppression of the National Assembly, in order to rule by decree and plebiscite in the name of ‘the people’? Stand back for Boris Bonaparte.When this stuff happened nearly four hundred years ago, English Parliamentarians went home and ground their swords to an edge. Not this time. The courage and integrity of most MPs flare up only briefly ...”

“... industry’ beckon, ‘accountability’ rules, and we’re all ‘investing in the future’ like billy-oh. As with larger questions of social and cultural change, it can be difficult to escape the magnetic pull of these extremes, difficult to get the measure of the changes that have been taking place without either falling into the absurdity of suggesting ...”