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“... been told. (Sadie Thompson, an American call-girl, appeared – name, fat legs and all – in the short story ‘Rain’.) It was a habit which left a ‘trail of angry people’. Maugham was born in 1874 in Paris, the youngest of four boys, to an English solicitor who looked after the affairs of the British expat community. His mother, remembered as a model ...”

“... details, while he took no account whatsoever of the other more important aspects … And in short, whereas he had thought to surpass in this work all the paintings in this craft, he scarcely reached the level of his own works executed in times past. Binet reproduces this passage, imagining it appearing in a letter Vasari sent to Michelangelo on 7 ...”

“... but without a capital ‘h’, and without the stronger proprietorial claims now well-established. Philip Friedman, pioneer of Jewish history under the Nazis, used it: but only as a descriptive equivalent with several others, and he seems to have preferred the expression ‘the Jewish Catastrophe’. At this stage ‘holocaust’ may have been more commonly ...”

“... Miss Lucy and drunken Miss Amy. When she comes home on an awkward visit from England with her short-tempered husband, he makes their little boy return Miss Amy’s gift of sweeties from her coat-pocket. He has no way of knowing how much has been rejected. ‘By such choices we gradually become exiles until at last we are quite alone.’ In ‘My Sister ...”

“... up alongside bank robbery and murder. His books do not offer hope. Right can only win in the short term. We are all guilty of existence and our sheer numbers make us enemies of the good green earth. Ben Elton dabbled in these waters in Stark, and, despite the jokes, there is no reason to believe that he or Hiaasen think humans are capable of much ...”

“... its pioneers to the margins. Wrack’s book is an attempt at restoration. It’s a long history. Philip Sidney’s ‘A Dialogue between Two Shepherds’ (c.1580) contains one of the earliest recorded references to football: ‘A tyme there is for all, my mother often sayes,/When she, with skirts tuckt very hy, with girles at football playes.’ There are ...”

“... and her combination of the staged and the documentary puts her in company with Bill Brandt, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Gregory Crewdson, Wall and others. It’s more interesting, however, to consider her work alongside that of contemporary female practitioners: the psychoanalytically inflected images of young girls by Sarah Jones; Justine Kurland’s ...”

“... Revisions’ (Elizabeth Cary, Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Wroth). Each chapter contains a short biography and textual explications that analyse ‘the conflicts among the various authorities that claimed a woman’s duty – her own family, her husband, her King, her religion’. Lewalski is most successful when tracing the paradoxical effects of such ...”

“... movies and television, and one of them is that TV thrives on situations, faces, interruptions and short-term drama, which is why games, soap operas and interviews make such ideal material for it. What TV doesn’t seem to need is a world, a created visual space with its own aura and co-ordinates. The world it has is enough, our world caught on a camera; or no ...”

“... historian and writer for children, has been singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may ...”

“... by our intelligence come out to play. We meet ancestral selves, neither gods nor demons but short semi-humans with hairy ears and senses differently attuned – the eyesight of an eagle, the nose of a hound. The phenomena are internal, generated by the psychological mechanisms that connect us to each other and to our evolutionary past. Aware of ...”

“... In the midst of writing his biography of Philip Larkin, Andrew Motion was contacted by a spiritualist who claimed to have been speaking to Larkin in the Beyond; later Larkin sent a posthumous word of approval for the book. Could the cosmic wires have been crossed and could the spiritualist have been talking to Martin Seymour-Smith? For this massive biography of Hardy – or ‘Tom’, as Seymour-Smith chummily calls him – has the vehemence of divine revelation and the fervour of personal mission ...”

“... his best works are Falconer, a cross between a gay prison novel and a Jacobean tragedy, and the short stories. A sad late letter, written while he was dying of cancer, reports how he had distributed copies of the collected stories to the doctors attending him, and how much the doctors had liked them: ‘they seem in the end to be mostly what I’ve ...”

“... two-volume register is a project engendered by the Strachey Trust and given memorable impetus by Philip Larkin at the 1979 Standing Conference of National and University Libraries. It covers 20th-century British literary authors whose manuscripts are held in publicly-owned collections in the British Isles (private collectors, no doubt burglar-wary, on the ...”

“... In The Leopard Lampedusa wrote of Angelica and Tassoni in middle age: ‘they had had a very short affair thirty years before, and kept the intimacy – for which there is no substitute – conferred by a few hours spent between the same pair of sheets.’ Nothing in this correspondence suggests that Morris had shared any sheets with Aglaia or Georgie ...”