“... own landlord in Manchester in the Sixties and on a well-known painter whom some have identified as Frank Auerbach. Having arrived in Manchester as a research student, Sebald chances on Ferber’s studio during one of his long, solitary, weekend walks around the city’s soot-blackened ruins, the haunted mansions of its industrial past. The artist’s method is ...”

“... as an ancestor by the present generation of Northern Irish poets. You find him in collections like Frank Ormsby’s Poets from the North of Ireland, and poets like Derek Mahon and Michael Longley praise him. The praise doesn’t come because he wrote about Northern Ireland – there are a few fine Irish poems, but not ...”

“... other people first – in the years since the war than actually died in battle. In Dispatches, Michael Herr describes meeting an ocean-eyed Lurp (a former member of a Long Range Patrol) who, between tours, would stick a hunting rifle out of the window of his parents’ home and draw aim on passing cars and people: ‘It used to put my folks real ...”

“... up into a mass of unrelated specialisms. The Cambridge Social History, edited in three volumes by Michael Thompson, looks very much like an ambitious attempt to restore coherence and direction. But the stated aim is the more modest one of communicating ‘the fruits of recent writing and the most recent research in social history to the wider audience of ...”

“... other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919. Erika remembered a time during the shortages of the First World War when food had to be divided but there was one fig left over. ‘What did my father do? He gave this fig just to me alone . . . the other three children stared in ...”

“... others’, and read now mainly for Beckett’s contribution. The other essays are by Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage and William Carlos Williams, and there are two ‘letters of protest’, the second written in a sort of Finneganese, and long thought ...”

“... And, gratified to have your guess endorsed, You warm to me. I thaw, and am approved. But, to be frank, the sentiment is forced, When I pretend, for your sake, to be moved. To feel so little, when his sympathies Would be so much engaged (he would have said), Surprised the poet too. But there it is, The heart is not to be solicited. Believe me, sir, I ...”

“... written a lively, serviceable biography, but Chandler’s personal torments were made public in Frank McShane’s posthumously ‘authorised’ biography of 1975, and Hiney offers fundamentally the same account. The only child of an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother, Raymond Chandler was raised in England after his father abandoned the family. He ...”

“... Ionce​ drove to Forest Lawn Memorial Park. It was before Michael Jackson had his crypt there, but I remember finding Walt Disney’s grave and that of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. A few writers are there too: Theodore Dreiser, who wrote well about department stores in Sister Carrie, and Clifford Odets, who believed shopping was one of America’s chronic diseases ...”

“... studio in Virginia. The film moves (rather in the same way as Dean’s tremendous portrait of old Michael Hamburger fondling his apples) from a world of light and vitality, glimpsed through the studio blinds, towards a final montage of grey trees against a storm-warning sky. Halfway through the exhibition one turns off into Soane’s strange shrunken ...”

“... the press, their contrasting positions sufficiently indicated by two representative titles – Michael O’Carroll’s Pius XII: Greatness Dishonoured and John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. The case against Pacelli is both complex and cumulative. As nuncio in Munich he experienced the seizure of power by the communists, led ...”

“... parents were comfortably middle-class: his mother, Agnes, from well-to-do shopkeepers; his father, Michael, from teachers, Classicists and Irish-speaking Parnellite nationalists. Michael O’Nolan gave to his 12 children his silence, his linguistic pedantry, and a home life in spacious houses unmolested by schooling until ...”

“... suicide, but there is no record of him after his Confessions end. Even the publication of a frank sexual memoir – the best way, Rayfield rather oddly claims, ‘to focus public attention on your identity’ – did little to rescue Victor from oblivion. The Confessions were written, in French, in either 1908 or 1912 (Rayfield’s ‘Preface’ and ...”

“... When Michael Heseltine launched a not-too-oblique attack on Irish neutrality in the course of a visit to Northern Ireland on 4 May, he was – presumably – unaware of the fact that he was reopening a book which both Churchill and de Valera had decided peaceably to close almost exactly thirty years ago. That at any rate would be the charitable explanation ...”

“... limitations of a young architect, leaving his drawing board and sketchbook for reality. It was Frank Newby, a superb (and generous) engineer, who made the untried concept of the lavishly glazed building actually work; it was the young Michael Wilford, newly arrived in the office as the first full-time assistant, who ...”