“... worsen or remedy it. He admires writers who force their language into weird contemporary shapes (Joyce, Pound, Gadda), but his solution is Kafka’s: ‘to speak of the intricate tangle of our situation using a language so seemingly transparent that it creates a sense of hallucination.’ For this Calvino, drawn to limits, boundaries and impossible ...”

“... a racial melodrama that would put him in the company of Mark Twain (Pudd’nhead Wilson), James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), William Faulkner (Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, Go down, Moses) and Nella Larsen (Passing) – all of whom examined the meaning of American freedom as flight across the colour line. Like his ...”

“... brief and penetrating fables, Philippe Sollers’s Women lands with the dull thud of what Henry James would have called a loose baggy monster, though the publishers describe it as a ‘post-modernist odyssey’. Women is, if not exactly experimental, a stylistic oddity since it consists of a 550-page monologue foregoing syntax and sentence structure to ...”

“... The book has its international theme (with Jacobson’s native South Africa substituted for Henry James’s America), and it raises Jamesian uncertainties about who, in the end, is the victim of whom, and about where guilt truly lies. Hidden in the Heart isn’t a book for those who don’t believe in coups de foudre, or who think that once the erotic storm ...”

“... a deficit of good will and may be one reason why the city has never enjoyed a good press (although Joyce, oddly, claimed to like it). As hardened a traveller as Paul Theroux emerged wild-eyed and spluttering: ‘I knew at once that Belfast was an awful city ... demented and sick ... a hated city ... one of the nastiest cities in the world ... the old horror ...”

“... known as AE) in a Dublin hotel, on the very day which is recorded in Ulysses. Meeting Joyce in Paris in 1924, he tells him: ‘Well, you gave George Russell an eternal and unbreakable alibi for that afternoon. But I know and he knows that he was not in the National Library.’ Other celebrities among the great unfictitious dead get similarly rough ...”

“... sense, as the past tense or noun-form of the verb ‘to think’, it had already been used by Joyce in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake). Not all the words that entered our dictionary for the first time in 1952 were new to the world. Some were just persistent border-crossers. Among these were tapenade (which, like hallucinogenic, had to wait decades to ...”

“... Away (1992). ‘I read the Bible, the Koran, all of Swift, all of Sterne, Invisible Man, Baldwin, Joyce, Balzac, Auden, Roethke,’ the preternaturally gifted, four-year-old narrator of Everett’s tenth novel, Glyph (1999), announced, in a passage that might have doubled as an abbreviated list of the author’s own interests. (The literary ones, at ...”

“... to them’. They are merely stages on his way through the requisite dark night of the soul. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist – as a young alien – looms over this, and Coetzee is even harsher towards his younger self than Joyce is to Stephen’s high aspirations. Like many proud isolationists, he is intensely ...”

“... written out of the story of the discovery of DNA, in which she had played a crucial part. James Watson’s outrageously self-heroising Double Helix systematically ridiculed and patronised ‘Rosy’s’ contributions to the work (‘Rosy’, needless to say, was a diminutive she never used herself), while at the same time portraying her as ...”

“... writing’ – Updike, for example. He hated anything that sounded mannered or experimental, so Joyce, Beckett and others were beneath consideration. He asked me which writers I was reading. I told him Nathanael West, Emily Dickinson, Camus. He said he didn’t think much of any of them. He advocated the work of Thomas ...”

“... Reid’ is based on Bertrand Russell, when he is actually a libellously exact portrait of Sir James Barrie. The Cambridge edition is, on balance, a great contribution to Lawrence studies, especially through its complete and comprehensive editing of Lawrence’s letters. Nonetheless, putting so many resources into one massive editorial project over fifteen ...”

“... are developed, and here Mr Buchan shows much originality and skill. The narrative accents of James, Dawn and William Nelson differ, and in doing so suggest nuances, not only of character but of characteristic medium: for we are tacitly invited to explain the stylistic variations at least partly in terms of the character’s recording method. ...”

“... and respected. He was fair-minded and decent. Through him, I got to know another seminarian called James Doyle. He would stop and talk if we met in the corridor, even though fraternisation between seminarians and lay students was frowned on. He had many opinions and enjoyed gossip and had a habit of winding me up so I could never quite tell whether he was ...”

“... reason that many people who actually knew him, including someone with so good a judgment as Henry James, found him utterly charming. The charm, if one thinks of it, must have lain in a kind of innocence, the insouciance of a born talker. He may have been all the bad things I have called him, but unaffectedly so and without calculation; if he was ...”