“... flashbacks over forty years, strange doings between psychiatrists and patients. It is as if Ross Macdonald or Raymond Chandler had gone Gothic, while the principal movement of the fiction remained the same: California tilted into American allegory, skeletons in every designer closet, the glossy present built over a ...”

“... like Zorro’s sword through fatty tissue and descriptive frou-frou, the severity of his cuts to Raymond Carver’s prose precipitating a controversy that still roils. Lish’s pedagogical manner, however, was the opposite of his surgical style. A born showman and provocateur, he presided over workshops and private master-classes that lasted for hours, often ...”

“... in trusting a child to be able to bear sorrow or terror: Charlotte’s death in Charlotte’s Web; Raymond Briggs’s Snowman melting into nothing; the blood and horror of fairy tales. Children can metabolise more fictional grief than we give them credit for. There’s a death in my most recent book which led a child to send me a letter that ended in a ...”

“... ambitious woman without an enlightened father might adopt what the historian Sarah Gwyneth Ross calls a ‘filial persona’ to secure support without scandal – and it required all the genuflection one might expect. ‘I commit myself to your boundless dignity, wisdom and authority,’ Isotta Nogarola wrote to the celebrated humanist pedagogue ...”

“... printer’s ink, buttons, dice, catfood, soap, machine lubricant, surgical thread, ordnance. When Raymond Chandler found himself stringing tennis rackets for a living, he was probably working with bits of whale tendon. Nowadays, there are substitutes for most whale parts, including the tendon. The International Whaling Commission, which came into being almost ...”

“... game was worth the economic risk – most players were amateurs with other careers. The great Raymond Kopa(szewski), part of a legendary Real Madrid team and pivotal to France’s emergence in the 1950s, was the son of Polish immigrants. Just Fontaine, whose thirteen goals at Sweden 1958 remains the record for a single tournament, was born in Marrakesh to ...”