“... visit to the clinic. The rest of the novel consists of dialogue between Alicia and her doctor, Michael Cohen, taking place over several sessions in the weeks leading up to her suicide. By comparison with The Passenger, with its cryptic lapses into memory, dream and flashback and all its dangling plot threads, Stella Maris is alarmingly ...”

“... was the first in a loose ‘LA trilogy’ (with Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire), while The Straight Story (1999) was suspiciously without perversion, a sweet Midwestern road movie rated ‘G for General’. ‘Isn’t it odd that there are two directors named David Lynch?’ someone said at a preview screening.The best essay in David Lynch’s American ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”

“... bridges, starving hospitals of funds, is part of a suicide-note delirium. When the worst is coming straight at you at a thousand miles a minute, embrace it. Evelyn made this entry in his diary for Sunday, 2 September 1666:After dinner the fire continuing, with my Wife & Sonn took Coach & went to the bank side in Southwark, where we beheld that dismal ...”

“... also included in the volume. The conversation is quirky and illuminating, with Russell playing the straight man, the practical critic, the questioner, while Wollen plays the celebrity scholar looking back over the theory wars. We learn that Wollen wrote Signs and Meaning ‘in the month of May 1968’, which is impressive for all sorts of reasons, and that he ...”

“... see, And sink them in the river as they swim. GUISE: ‘Tis well advised, Dumaine; go see it straight be done. [Exit DUMAINE] And in the meantime, my lord, could we devise To get those pedants from the King Navarre That are tutors to him and the Prince of Condé – ANJOU: For that, let me alone; cousin, stay you here, And when you see me in, then ...”

“... a more businesslike arrangement than popular legend allows. Conway gets German occupation policy straight – the essential first step in any study of collaboration. The Germans governed their conquests in a variety of ways: direct Nazi Party rule after the annihilation of local authority, as in Poland; Nazi Party rule through the local administration, as in ...”

“... Benetton-Ford, Ferrari and what is now McLaren-Peugeot, had been catching up. And Benetton had Michael Schumacher, ten years younger and the one driver whose talent was now close to Senna’s own. Senna was openly anxious at the start of the year. He went out of the first two races in incidents that could have been caused by nerves. He was the only driver ...”

“... of the natural world and derives from Pliny’s Natural History. The 15th-century mariner Michael of Rhodes, who wrote a treatise on shipbuilding as part of an ambitious composition documenting navigation, mathematics and astronomy, urges his reader not to begin anything on ‘the first Monday of April, because on this day Cain killed his ...”

“... were about as welcome as fleas in a sleeping bag.’ ‘Bloody awful, all of it,’ she tells us straight off. The deals the company is working on pump up or destroy businesses, employ or lay off hundreds of thousands of people. She knows this, and she knows they have the power to sink Third World economies. Half-understood, seemingly arbitrary actions may ...”

“... advocate. My own hunch is that other Gurney personae usually written off as lunatic fictions – Michael Flood, Frederick Saxby, Valentine Fane, Griffiths Davies and so on: there were many – may yet turn out to be comrades from the trenches, those other persons he so loved. Although writing of place-names rather than people, P.J. Kavanagh puts the matter ...”

“... soon every scrap of paper that survived the purges at Max Gate will have been through the mill. Michael Millgate calls his new edition of the biography ‘The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy’. Since he has stripped it of the thin marital disguise of his wife’s name and cleared it of Florence’s editorial emendations carried out after ...”

“... as can be.  When the war ended Theo resolved that he would make his way back home alone, in a straight line, without twists or turns. The distance to his home was great, hundreds of miles. Nevertheless it seemed to him he could see the route clearly. He knew that this would separate him from people, and that he would have to remain in uninhabited places ...”

“... first time I saw, or looked repeatedly at, a painting by Frank Auerbach was in the art historian Michael Podro’s living room – it must have been in 1968. The painting was Primrose Hill, Autumn Morning. I’d barely heard of Auerbach at that point (modern painting for me was French and American), and I certainly didn’t have a clue who had done the ...”

“... difficult to read Milton’s narrative in Paradise Lost in this way – we visualise the Archangel Michael’s two-handed sword not as the double lever on a printing press, but simply as a sword, while we see ‘chaos’ and the ‘abyss’ physically, as part of outer space. Yet Milton, the adept student of Spenser, was designing a flexibly symbolic ...”