“... repressed, just allowed to slip beyond the reach of his conscious word-choices. In her very sharp introduction to Women Writers at Work, a collection of Paris Review interviews first published as a volume in 1988, and now expanded and updated to include Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood remarks that the writers have been ...”

“... Spender ‘the slave of his friends’, but it is an aspect of the wonderful storytelling in Katherine Bucknell’s biography that we only become incrementally aware of Spender’s duplicity, much as people do in life when they are subject to the progressive smears of others. Spender might have plumed all his life on his important friendship with ...”

“... I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones. I felt that such was the force of my devouring curiosity that the party had dematerialised and the walls melted and there were only two of us in the vast room, and such was the hard power of my stare that Her Majesty ...”

“... characters’ minds, sprinkling information like confetti: ‘Libby adored Of Human Bondage and Katherine Mansfield and Edna Millay and Elinor Wylie and quite a lot of Virginia Woolf, but she could never get anybody to talk with her about books any more, because Lakey said her taste was sentimental.’ Or: ‘But the red-letter day in Mr Andrews’s life ...”

“... two main phrases that render the piece two-souled, like a dialogue of lovers. The modulation to C-sharp major evokes their kissing, caressing and love-making.’ Narrative: ‘The appearance of Donna in a low-cut gold lamé gown with a slit skirt left the staid, distinguished company gasping.’ Four of Kosinski’s earlier books have just been reissued in ...”

“... Hers​ is one of the faces that rises up when I am wandering the library of my mind. The gaze, sharp and swimming, with the right eye like a bead on a glass. The swinging haircut, a little disarranged with thinking, the fringe you can imagine her roughly pushing off her forehead, as her penned-in and pacing girl characters did ...”

“... or whether there’s any chance that he and the apparently bewitchingly unpredictable Katherine might be. Taken together, the books are luxuriant and Hobbesian. There is, refreshingly, no sneer of Pharisaical exemption or authorial superiority. Szalay is an offended satirist with a remarkable verbal imagination, not a comedian happy to get ...”

“... these Spanish-speaking republics. Naipaul does not ask what they have received from New Zealand. Katherine Mansfield is a contribution to his world, but not Quiroga, nor Onetti, to name two writers from the New Zealand-sized population of Uruguay. Then there is machismo. Anglo-Saxon writers are attracted by this theme, with its offer of swift insight into ...”

“... conspiracy to replace Elizabeth I with her papist cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, Donne was, as Katherine Rundell puts it in her new biography, ‘not just Catholic … but super-Catholic’, the scion of a double line of renowned religious recusants. His father’s family estates were confiscated by the crown, leaving the elder John Donne to pursue a ...”

“... started after college in Pittsburgh. From its theatres, opera house and concert hall, she sent sharp, highly critical reviews to Nebraska papers. She formed a new attachment to Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a Pittsburgh judge in whose house she resided during the next five years while she taught English to high-school students. Cather’s fragile ...”

“... caused rioting in the streets in Dublin when it was first performed in 1907. In portraying the sharp edge of class systems, Shaw had done something similar, if more limited, three years earlier in John Bull’s Other Island. Kavanagh, predictably, thought Shaw a ‘bogus Irishman’. Kavanagh first arrived in 1931, symbolically and actually, on the Dublin ...”

“... Court connection, his ‘Aunt Ashley’ (as he termed her in 1600), his mother’s elder sister Katherine Ashley (née Champernowne), who was appointed Elizabeth’s governess by Henry VIII in 1544. Ashley was undoubtedly the person closest to Elizabeth for the next twenty years, but she died in 1565, when Ralegh was only 11, so her direct influence on his ...”

“... her admiring charge, was the daughter of a Harley Street ophthalmic surgeon, Nathaniel Harman, and Katherine Chamberlain, first cousin of Neville and niece of the great Joseph. In later life Elizabeth was told that her father, a serious citizen, never made love the night before a cataract operation. His courtship had been all but shattered by a religious ...”

“... and the extravagant letters, that kept her interested for so many years. With others, such as Katherine Mansfield, the spell worked only for a few moments, but it worked. To T.S. Eliot he was Mr Apollinax, devouring the afternoon with his dry, passionate talk; but apparently the afternoon wasn’t all he devoured with it. And considering that his lovers ...”

“... with old religious or monastic connections (the Whitefriars, the Minories, St Martin le Grand, St Katherine by the Tower), was one of London’s quasi-autonomous ‘liberties’, and so not governed by the lord mayor. The second was that there had already been a theatre in the area, immediately adjacent to the building on which Burbage’s carpenters were now ...”