“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by ex-wives, hangers-on both ex and current, by agents, publishers and magazine editors – in short, both those who have given and those who have received. There is a half-hearted attempt to elevate the proceedings by including testimony from the likes of Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, but even they tend to get dragged down into the mire. (Who else but a ...”

“... The first thing a novelist must provide is a separate world.’ So Philip Larkin pronounced, and his two novels certainly provide one, as does his poetry. Is the same true of his friend Kingsley Amis, who hazarded the shrewd guess that Larkin published no more novels because he feared failure, in that genre, of the power to keep going with his own separate world of art? It seems likely that Amis has done something which in terms of the novel may be more difficult, and that is to carry the reader with him into whatever new places his interests or imagination have led him ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... earlier stomachers, but now backs and arms were also uncovered. Waists became very high – or ‘short’, in what was then the common term. Indeed, the busts of these dresses could measure as little as one and a half inches above the waist. With the loss of hoops, the fine muslin would cling to the body, accentuating the stomach and thighs. And the material ...”

“... you look at this wonderful, sumptuous catalogue and feel simultaneously replete – and curiously short-changed. Where, for example, is the colour work glimpsed in the book put together by Trudy Wilner Stack, 1964, the year Winogrand was on a roll, driving through the States on a Guggenheim Fellowship and making brilliant image after brilliant image? Wasn’t ...”

“... have the operation reversed.’ Metcalf shares a waiting room with a dentist who’s almost as short of clients as he is: ‘the waiting room was empty, except for a pair of evolved rabbits in miniature three-piece suits … Someone had to clean their bridgework, I guess, and my dentist wasn’t doing so well he could afford to turn away their ...”

“... shows. But that is what happened in January 1997, when the New Yorker published Lorrie Moore’s short story, ‘People like that Are the Only People Here’. What was so powerful about this story? The subject-matter, in the first place, was irresistibly painful. It concerns a mother, never named, who finds a blood clot while changing her baby: ‘what is ...”

“... the tortured relationship between Australia and its English-speaking relations: one of his first short stories, ‘American Dreams’, is about a small Australian town and its dreams of ‘big smooth cars’, huge refrigerators, ‘women like Kim Novak and men like Rock Hudson’. The eight-year-old protagonist of His Illegal Self is called Che Selkirk, so ...”

“... individuals.’ Carlyle’s principles were more influential than his practice. Although his short memoir of his friend John Sterling is counted as a minor classic of biography, his much more elaborate life of Cromwell, not to say his interminable History of Frederick the Great, has never been shortlisted among the world’s greatest examples of the ...”

“... with television’s ‘grammar’, with its conventions and how they might be broken. As a short-story writer I was attracted by its scale, its intimacy. The possibilities and limitations presented by the 30, 50 or even 75-minute television play seemed very close in some ways to those presented by the ...”

“... He insists, and he has the right to insist, that he is as authentic a voice of modern Britain as Philip Larkin is. As some pages of Poetry and Metamorphosis make clear, the Britain that Tomlinson speaks for is one that most of us, gratefully or not, are ready to think defunct: the Britain of Ford Madox Ford in 1913-15, which was host to Wyndham Lewis’s ...”

“... written word cannot compete with the zoom lens. Sporting events are, for the most part, simply too short, so that much of the writing is concerned with what happens ‘off the field’. Even cricket, which used to attract good writing, seems now to evoke so different an atmosphere that I doubt if it is worth reading about: but I may be wrong. There are, of ...”