“... defined and often extravagantly asymmetrical relationships were nothing new to Beckett and had long been a staple of his narratives. In Murphy the eponymous unemployed hero lounges blindfold on his rocking chair, philosophising, while his girlfriend is expected to pay for everything and obliged to prostitute herself to do so. Murphy is really sorry about ...”

“... just as such lines allowed people to forgive the diarist Alan Clark any number of horrors so long as he raised a smile when he wrote them down. The talent to write poshly is quickly taken as the talent to write well. It remains a kind of honesty that English readers – or English readers of English writers – prize above thoughtfulness, and certainly ...”

“... my destiny – but only if I let it. I took positive control over my life. There was a point not long ago when Dave Pelzer’s self-rescue manuals held the top three spots in the bestseller charts. In Britain, it is likely that one out of every 15 adults will have read a Pelzer book, and the ‘inspirational’ style in general, with its page-turning mix of ...”

“... The sun shines bright on the homely Victorine film studios in Nice. Meet Pamela is poised to go. Director Ferrand, however, is case-hardened; he knows that, on even such a straightforward programme-filler as this, compromise will be inevitable. Sure enough, the cat is disobedient. Increasingly dependent on the bottle, the actress playing the hero’s mother forgets her lines but stands on her dignity: ‘With Federico it was just – One, two three!’ The lab ruins a crowd scene ...”

“... entanglement of the two histories and cultures. Greece continued to exert its cultural influence long after its incorporation into the Roman Empire in the second century bc. Cicero modelled himself on Demosthenes; his tirade against Mark Antony in the Philippics invokes the Athenian orator directly. A few decades later, Horace memorably dismissed the ...”

“... He possessed the kind of embodied knowledge common to crafters down the centuries, described by Pamela H. Smith in From Lived Experience to the Written Word as acquired through ‘observation and repetitive bodily experience’. Smith’s study encompasses the period from 1400 to 1800, when practitioners increasingly sought to put their trades into ...”

“... involved with the cultural traditions and language of my country for the prospect of a year-long or perhaps life-long exile not to have a hard, ominous meaning for me.’ He was so unprepared that, on leaving the country less than a month after Hitler became chancellor, he failed to take his diaries and the pages of ...”

“... which he composed at 17. I am prejudiced because I first fell in love with the Façade verses long before I heard the music. Recently I had the opportunity to take part in performances in London drawing-room settings similar to the sociable premiere in Carlyle Square on Sunday, 24 January 1922. It is as true of Façade as of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier ...”

“... had recently passed, and came across a group of people standing expectantly on a street corner long after the cyclists had disappeared. He asked them what they were doing. ‘Nous attendons Godot,’ they replied, explaining that Godot was the oldest and slowest competitor in the race. Beckett is also supposed to have come up with the idea for the play ...”

“... vision splendid. Let Bernard Shaw, running on rich mixture, explain: Joyousness, a sacred gift long dethroned by the hellish laughter of derision and obscenity, rises like a flood miraculously out of the fetid dust and mud of the slums; rousing marches and impetuous dithyrambs rise to the heavens from people among whom the distressing noise called ...”

“... we do like having a glimpse of other people’s love affairs, a nosiness on which novelists have long relied. The novels themselves are very interesting, but the reader is likely to weary of glorified plot summaries and any reader who already knows the novels in question would be well advised to skip to the ‘real life’ segments. There Brophy has done us ...”

“... biographer, plainly, is to clear away the flak and innuendo. Some years ago, King discredited the long-held assumption that Savage himself was one of the unnamed fathers. She’s just as persuasive now in throwing doubt on the other prime suspect, a ‘would-be wit and self-serving layabout’ called William Hatchett – which leaves Hatchett with a single ...”

“... on the original page; James puts them in balloons and leads the eye back to their context with long wavy lines attached to the scratched-out words ... or squeezing between words left intact. Sometimes these revisions entirely fill a sheet or spill over to the next; sometimes, to regain a clear presentation of sequence, typed or handwritten transcriptions ...”

“... believable or not. Nothing harder, in that academic critics (and their obedient students) have long since learned to steer away from the illusions of human reality conjured by fiction. Characterisation is the ordinary measure of a writer’s achievement, but you have to look hard to find academic criticism on the subject. Some have seen the literary ...”

“... distant and unimportant. And as for Frances Partridge’s approval, I think I would have gone a long way to avoid spending a weekend at Ham Spray (that Bloomsbury house near Hungerford where Lytton Strachey died and Dora Carrington killed herself) with Frances Partridge watching my every move and writing it all up in her diary, honed for ...”