“... biographer Todd McCarthy observed, this was the ‘decisive film’ in Hawks’s career. In two short weeks, it seems, Bacall acquired the husky voice we all know. And you can’t beat the lines Jules Furthman gave her – sometimes picking up on things Slim Hawks had said. Bacall was young, but she looked and sounded ancient in her wisdom – and she ...”

“... is an opinion of Belloc’s vouched for, it seems, by two of his grandsons, Julian Jebb and Dom Philip Jebb OSB. Nothing about Belloc can be stranger to us today than the depth of his anti-semitism. He was a man who delighted in his own extravagances and inconsistencies, but there was commonly a hint of burlesque in his parading them, and that he was found ...”

“... it, an engraved card that read JULIAN MORROW. I stood there for a moment and then I knocked, three short raps. A minute or so passed, and another, and then the white door opened just a crack. A face looked out at me. Thus the narrator becomes the reader, and we share an ecstasy of wide-eyedness. Repeatedly, the novel returns to this function: as I was climbing ...”

“... works by Michelangelo, Col-eridge, Hogg, Stevenson, Kafka, Jean Rhys and numerous others. It is a short book, but dense. Warner’s highly complex line of argument, winding around so much material, and so tightly, produces a compacted, even crabbed architecture. You feel like you’ve stepped inside a miniaturised cathedral. The movement of the first chapter ...”

“... Compared to boring old Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, we think, had a short life and a gay one. When not writing his sonorous verse, he was spying, preaching atheism, fighting and getting murdered. Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight ...”

“... identify the author, but these, too, have grown faint. Revenge of the Lawn is a collection of short fiction written between 1962 and 1970, 62 pieces over 160 pages. The longest of them run to five pages. Several are only half a page or less. A few are mildly charming. Brautigan is puppyish and sometimes endearing when he effuses over a new girlfriend: he ...”

“... novels Raymond Chandler wrote between 1939 and 1953 featuring the Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe, and the best-known film adaptation of any of them, the 1946 movie of the first book, The Big Sleep, have helped to shape the perception of what America was like in the 1940s and early 1950s. The film is dark and menacing – Fredric Jameson writes ...”

“... Forward, but in neither case were most deaths deliberate. They were closer, as Mao’s biographer Philip Short put it, to what is legally defined as manslaughter.4 Conversion and mobilisation were the aims, not extermination. Of course, over time Mao’s gifts degenerated. His last significant essay, ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the ...”

“... perhaps only six middling poets worth attending to – six poets in England (and as far as long or short sight tells me, fewer still in the United States).’ That every year new maggots make new flies is what Grigson’s report comes to. In one of the new poems, ‘April Values’, he urges us to be more exclusive: Let us not prefer Ashbery to Yeats, Let us ...”

“... has been explored with varying degrees of insight by writers as different as Francine Prose, Philip Roth, James Hynes and even Jonathan Franzen in the opening pages of The Corrections. The Horned Man, however, is concerned with the campus only up to a point: its world is not self-enclosed, and can hardly be so, set as the college is in a decaying ...”

“... and meant to bring attention to the cause anyway. As with Allen Ginsberg, the bureau stopped short of interviewing Sontag because they knew that an interview would only result in bad publicity when she inevitably wrote about it. Some of the files were opened as a result of the efforts of the writers themselves or their publishers. Bennett Cerf sought the ...”

“... Chekhov may be divine, but he is responsible for much sinning on earth. The contemporary short story is essentially sub-Chekhovian. It is most obviously indebted to what Shklovsky called Chekhov’s ‘negative endings’: the way his stories expire into ellipses, or seem to end in the middle of a thought – ‘It was starting to rain ...”

“... I don’t handle divorce business.’ In general, scholarly investigators should follow Philip Marlowe’s rule. One feels degraded when Dickens’s private letters are subjected to infra-red photographic analysis (as they were in the 1950s). Beneath the crossings-out are references to Ellen Ternan, his mistress – or perhaps not his mistress ...”

“... us, it is natural that she should leave it out. It is relevant, however, to quote the opinion of Philip Larkin about poetry in wartime as it throws light on the weakness of much wartime prose. He certainly did not mean to comfort or console us either. He speaks harshly of poets whom we may have admired in our time: ‘A period which can laud the poetry of ...”

“... came ubiquitous Perrier), and at least for the historically-initiated, water power: France was short of coal. There was a time, too, not all that long ago, when another aspect of French concern was expressed in the requirement to pay for water in the locked bathroom for which the key was always carefully kept locked away at the hotel or pension desk. A few ...”