“... early forties, she determined to break free, so she hooked up with a guy sixteen years her junior, Frank Perry, who wanted to be a film director. They had a few years of activity together in the 1960s. She wrote and he directed: David and Lisa, The Swimmer and Diary of a Mad Housewife. They were in the money and the awards, and they were married. Joan ...”

“... that all power and domination should be given to the Lord?’ Sedgwick, like many others, was frank about the extent to which he regarded the rule of the Saints as made necessary by the reluctance of sinners to be governed as they should be: ‘we cannot in reason expect to have a free Parliament at this time, because the people are not fit to have a free ...”

“... footnotes, that this ‘critic, biographer and man of letters’, born in 1849, was knighted. Frank Schuster (1840-1928), ‘wealthy musiclover and giver of parties’, was still giving parties, and Sassoon spends a great deal of time in his radiance or under his shadow, making the most of the lavish facilities offered but carping to his diary. Butlers ...”

“... and Pale Fire’s Kinbote. It is clear that by giving consent to Field, Nabokov intended to do a Thomas Hardy: that is, write his life through a docile secretary. Indeed, he told Field as much: ‘I wanted to see the thing. The first biography, no matter what comes after, casts a certain shadow on the others.’ As events proved, Nabokov misjudged his ...”

“... variation.’ Segal spent three years first as a postdoctoral fellow under the study’s director, Thomas Bouchard, and then as the assistant director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research. Her book answers critics of Mistra who argue, as Joseph Jay did in the American Journal of Psychology in 2001, that ‘the studies of separated twins ...”

“... In April 1959 Frank O’Connor wrote to his editor at the New Yorker to say that he had taken ‘the family up to Sligo to see how Yeats was getting on’. Since Yeats had been dead twenty years, he should have been getting on just fine. But: Even he seemed to be disgruntled. Kavanagh the ex-poet ran into me soon after I came home, and the following conversation took place exactly as recorded ...”

“... such ... as to appear almost as a nervous “surrealism”’. ‘The American Poet’s Visit’, Frank Moorhouse’s funny account of provincial literary neurosis, had appeared in book form in 1972, and Peter Carey’s ‘American Dreams’, a post-Vietnam satire, in 1974. David Foster’s first novel, The Pure Land, came out in 1975, and, deceptively to one ...”

“... a little, maybe. But even if they were, that would be okay. I’ve just visited the house where Thomas Mann lived – it’s a little museum now in Zurich. I don’t think there’s a more autobiographical writer in the world. Buddenbrooks is a generational novel about his family. It’s more than that, of course, but it’s the history of his family he is ...”

“... Stone was born in August 1937, nine months after Don DeLillo and three – we’re told – after Thomas Pynchon. Dog Soldiers, his second novel, made his name in the mid-1970s, and since then he has stubbornly held his ground on the upper slopes of American literary life. Fellowships, prizes, grants and commissions have rarely been in short supply, and his ...”

“... before 1933 became easy and familiar, a rarity with Hitler. Röhm, Hess, Goebbels, Hans Frank and many other friends of Hitler came and went . . . He enjoyed the family and artistic atmosphere at home with the Wagners, playing the kind uncle to the Wagner children, and fancied himself a friend of the arts. Almost every sentence jars. Hamann ...”

“... is the most ‘European’ of Roth’s novels, and the tone of this passage will strike readers of Thomas Mann or Franz Kafka as familiar, perhaps even jadedly so. Yet the intensity of the commitment to Keatsian negative capability is remarkable in a writer so insistently loyal to the American novel’s covenant with quotidian, lived life. It is no small part ...”

“... what he set out to do as a serious youngster devoted to the piano, classical as well as jazz.Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller – ‘Tom’ or ‘Thomas’ to his friends and family – had formidable technique, akin to a great athlete’s, and an exhaustless inventiveness and capacity to delight. His articulation of notes was ...”

“... Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his account of R.S. Thomas as ‘primarily a religious poet, tormented by a sense of God’s absence, and berating his parishioners for using refrigerators, washing machines, and other modern evils’, or of air-headedness in his remark that Mrs Yeats’s ability to hear spirit ...”

“... also an inherently unstable fiction.’This isn’t to say that pre-modern societies forbade frank speaking on principle. In classical times, free citizens were able to speak their minds in the assembly on matters of public interest, civic or religious. In Athens, this liberty was called parrhesia (speaking everything), in Latin, licentia. This sort of ...”

“... Ireland in the 1950s, a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully ...”