“... just finished Ashley Kahn’s absorbing history of a date, ‘A Love Supreme’: The Creation of John Coltrane’s Classic Album.* Trane was a nice sheets-of-sound antidote to the ormolu, love-nests and scheming courtiers of the Ancien Régime. Yet despite having a workable assortment of Mulligans and Bakers and Konitzes, I was also feeling vaguely ...”

“... are supreme. Such criteria may not help in judging the more romantic English genre that contains Richardson and Jane Austen and Dickens, all as different from each other as they could be, yet none precisely a realist. Smaller in scale, Amis is – like Evelyn Waugh, in some respects an influence on him – a comedian, a comic artist: yet neither fails to be ...”

“... studied theatre in Paris for a short time, and then returned to Ireland, playing a small part in John Ford’s film The Quiet Man and working for a time at the Gate Theatre with Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir. In the summer of 1953 he directed Siobhán McKenna and Cyril Cusack in The Playboy of the Western World, playing the part of Shawn Keogh ...”

“... the professions, and other institutions.’ This is hardly news, and was not news to Samuel Richardson, whose novel Clarissa is an excellent analysis of our rape culture and what it means to live in a rape culture. Even ‘nice’ men, individual ‘nice’ men, must at some point in their lives collude in woman-bashing in order to preserve the status ...”