“... to dampen the enthusiasm. New editions appear on what has begun to feel like a weekly basis. More striking still, perhaps, are the new forms of support act. Edward Mendelson describes his critical study of Mrs Dalloway as a guide to the novel’s ‘inner life’. Mark Hussey’s is subtitled ‘Biography of a Novel’. What next for the literary ...”

“... interested in helping the impoverished and persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, but Bentwich was more worried about the number of secular and emancipated Jews in Western Europe who were becoming assimilated. A solution to the problems of both groups, he believed, could be found by resurrecting the Land of Israel in Palestine. At the end of the 18th ...”

“... man is born, and married, and dies, becomes his theatre, and the sun shines as well, if sometimes more indirectly, on the indoor as on the outdoor man.’ Sickert enjoyed making pronouncements – his most recent biographer, Matthew Sturgis, calls him ‘a man of strong opinions loosely held’ – and this one should be treated with some scepticism. A ...”

“... in the first place. Bridget goes round pretty much at my pace, Rupert as always slower and taking more in, noting the tears brimming in Lucrezia’s eyes, for instance, and how she has had to half slip herself out of her heavily brocaded dress the more easily to stab herself. He marvels at the oath of the Batavii which (it ...”

“... immigrants from Eastern Europe. The name he chose has often been said to be a tribute to Dylan Thomas, but it seems he first thought of it as ‘Dillon’, possibly after the hard-bitten Dodge City lawman Matt Dillon, hero of the TV Western Gunsmoke. He was twenty years old, skinny and scruffy in jeans and a ‘Huck Finn cap’. In an early article in the ...”

“... last plays suggest an angry and disturbed artist who uses drama as an occasion to stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure, leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before. It is this second type of lateness that I find deeply interesting: it is a sort of deliberately ...”

“... pure for a slave to breathe. Let the black go free.’ The truth, as usual, is less dramatic but more instructive. English law, which recognised and enforced slavery until well after the Norman Conquest, no longer did by the 16th century, when a lucrative slave trade developed between West Africa and the American and Caribbean colonies. The courts of ...”

“... incorporating, as it were, the back half of Beaumont, who otherwise appears in the novel as Thomas de Blacqueville, Olivier’s best friend, bumped off in a duel before Olivier has even embarked for the New World. By grafting Beaumont onto Garmont and Tocqueville onto Blacqueville, Carey establishes the rules of his creative game and signs over to ...”

“... toying (‘O Who is trying to shield Whom?/Who left a hairpin in the room?’), but often it’s a more unnerving collision and collusion of worlds:The glacier knocks in the cupboard,The desert sighs in the bed,And the crack in the tea-cup opensA lane to the land of the dead.These vistas owe something to Auden’s first love, ...”

“... disgusting. In fact La Mort propagande combines several of the themes he would develop more extensively later on. First, the desire evinced by Proust’s character Mlle Vinteuil to humiliate her father in Guibert’s case becomes a nearly erotic pleasure in spitting on his parents’ image. Guibert has a grotesque flash to his childhood, when his ...”

“... really rather a curiosity.’ In truth, nothing quite like it had been achieved or attempted since Thomas Arne’s masque Alfred (1740), produced for the Prince of Wales and chiefly memorable for including the first performance of ‘Rule, Britannia’. Seven months later, when the music critic of the Times (unaware of Sheffield’s undertaking) suggested that ...”

“... not expected to believe that James I had actually been raised to heaven by pink-limbed angels, any more than imperial Romans were expected to believe that their dead emperors actually became gods. The case is different, however, for religious images such as depictions of the Assumption of Mary. The Assumption is a post-biblical tradition. (It is called an ...”

“... from the Order of Odd Fellows, buying the rest later for £150. When his growing family needed more space, and television versions of his books provided the means, he bought a timber-framed Tudor house (due to be demolished) for a pound, disassembled it and moved it eighteen miles to sit next to the hall. The cover of Powsels and Thrums shows an image by ...”

“... sure they were one and the same. I sometimes went back to the picture, and I got to know a little more as time went by. He was missing. I’d never seen him, and I was born 28 years after he disappeared at sea. I couldn’t get over these bits of information. He looked like Glasgow. He was missing at sea. In another time, when I’d come to look something ...”

“... Tearful Jakie runs away even as his father’s prayer wells up on the soundtrack. A decade or more passes. In a studio reconstruction of Coffee Dan’s, San Francisco show business hang-out of the era, Jolson makes his first appearance as the mature Jakie, now known as Jack Robin. The entire scene is redolent of his liberation from tribal taboo. Jack ...”