“... cows. But the book’s fractured descriptions of the New York landscape, heavily influenced by Joyce and Eliot, are resourcefully done. David’s fraught transactions with other children are brilliantly dramatised, and despite the solemn treatment of his terrors and coming of age, there’s more than a touch of black farce in the novel’s stage ...”

“... be expected to do too much. No Country for Young Men is simultaneously about 1979 and 1921. James Duffy has come to Dublin to make a programme about Sparky Driscoll, a fellow American killed long ago in the Troubles. Another way back to the death of Driscoll is through the scattered wits of Sister Judith, a nun who has been buried in a convent all these ...”

“... He didn’t do this by writing a ‘gay novel’ like Maurice, or like those that Gore Vidal and James Baldwin would later write in The City and the Pillar and Giovanni’s Room – novels in which the homosexual condition is itself the subject, with an unusual dominance of maleness. For Forster a forthright novel on homosexual themes was a legal ...”

“... as nation-builders, constructing an intellectually plausible lineage for the nation state. As Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob demonstrate, a particular version of history has played a major role in defining the American nation. What they call the ‘self-congratulatory national history’ of the 19th century helped to recast the experience of ...”

“... she describes is familiar, and memorable, and can be recognised more generally. The pages of Henry James, for example, are full of a sexual desire he has ‘forgotten’ in this sense, that is, neither shouted out nor encrypted nor entirely repressed, just allowed to slip beyond the reach of his conscious word-choices. In her very sharp introduction to Women ...”

“... experiment with an unlimited, flowing style, almost a form of stream-of-consciousness (he admired Joyce, Céline and Beckett) in which characters associate and soliloquise madly. He called it pabeni, to which the closest approximation, according to Skvorecky, is ‘palavering’. This palavering is really anecdote without end. The lovely truancy with which ...”

“... have bitten more sharply the hand that clapped.’ But, still staggering on, the effort continues. James Reidel, who in 2006 published parallel text translations of Bernhard’s second and third books of poems, In Hora Mortis and Under the Iron of the Moon, has come back ten years later with an English-only Collected Poems. Most readers, even quite possibly ...”

“... of Ireland appeals, in every sense and whatever its troubles, to Seamus Heaney. Some writers – Joyce, Milosz, Stevenson – have to stand well back from the native canvas in order to see the composition, but others dwell inside the painting, loving the paint, the smell of oils and the fine smear of themselves. This new book – written ‘for both with ...”

“... the regular churchgoing of the middle classes was more than a matter of outward convention. As James Obelkevich observes in the chapter on religion, ‘the deep and genuine religious commitment evident in this and other classes in Victorian society should not be underestimated.’ Michael Thompson’s chapter, at the beginning of Volume One, is a tour de ...”

“... friends in a charmed circle. This even applies in some degree to so deliberately moving a poem as James Fenton’s ‘Children in Exile’, describing the arrival in Italy of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees. I hear a child moan in the next room and I see    The nightmare spread like rain across his face And his limbs twitch in some vestigial combat ...”

“... men breathe.’ The cultural revolutionary celebrated here (unlikely as it must now seem) is Sir James Frazer, extravagantly written up over half a page in the News Chronicle of 27 January 1937. The article – under the title ‘He discovered why you believe what you do’ – certainly does not stint its praises of the grand old man, then in his ...”

“... often fail: the more complete and compelling the circumstantial detail of, say, Ellman’s Joyce or Painter’s Proust or Edel’s James, the less likely it seems that the man could have written the books; the better we come to know the artist, the greater the seeming gap between him and the work. But in Ozick’s ...”

“... from coast to coast, she never got divorced and never gave any trouble, so she doesn’t come into James Fox’s story much; and neither does the eldest Langhorne sister Lizzie. Lizzie just got on the others’ nerves and was poor. There were also three brothers, but they don’t come into the story at all. They drank a lot, as did many Southern gentlemen ...”

“... with tyranny which democracy may be moved to make, ‘Eisenhower’s Visit to Franco, 1959’, James Wright flashlit the dark disingenuousness of Fascism: Franco stands in a shining circle of police. His arms open in welcome. He promises all dark things Will be hunted down. The Fascist leader proceeds with a travesty of ordered enlightened equability; he ...”

“... of fiction.’ This remark probably arose from his habitual disrespect for, or worry about, Henry James. The Ambassadors is given more attention in Aspects of the Novel than any other novel, except possibly Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, though the intention is in neither case to praise or to admire; and the Commonplace Book contains mildly disparaging remarks ...”