“... the place,’ James wrote, ‘had seemed cruel to the poor little dressmaker outside, it may be believed that it did not strike her as an abode of mercy while she pursued her devious way into the circular shafts of cells … there were walls within walls and galleries on top of galleries; even the daylight lost its colour.’Millbank Prison had ...”

“... baking Craigleith stone, to bank away to the airish Firth and Inchkeith Island, the Ferry and the May. I watch you watching jugglers; the obligatory lovers, and a snake-woman swallowing a sword. You are turning heliotropic in this acropolis of light, barely breaking sweat. Lifting your hands to your hair a drop runnels down under one arm to its cup and the ...”

“... 31 of the International Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees recognises that refugees may be obliged to use illicit means of entry into a safe country – just as they may have to evade customs and immigration checks to get out of their own – and requires that host countries ‘shall not impose penalties’ on ...”

“... The planet may have tilted, if only a hint when the shelf of cloud burnt angrily before dusk           jack-o’-lantern stuff her hair the colour of her coat, fallwear       ******* The wet stain her bathing-suit left on the bench           the shape of Bolivia, drying, drying into atol ...”

“... A sheep nibbling earth’s firstlings is my spirit that prays for the day Christ may stoop me as a cooper denies his timber’s nature – for two years in this windy eye of God I have wrestled and prayed against myself and you ask if I have the time for poems ... Your letter brought me tears, and I was grateful. Oppression, expression, these are words but lack the radish-bite of right words for two years in the flinty field of etymology ...”

“... and never quite. But further, further still: even the painter must be destroyed in order that one may become the ...”

“... the radiant, divergent final paragraph, is to be invaded or colonised: hanging on to your own life may mean the excommunication of all others. Relying on the complexity of its narrative threading, on detail, voice and perspective, the story offers one further aesthetic surprise: a range of sympathy capable of embracing both the mother’s brave self-delusion ...”

“... years, Wharton must be regarded as immortal. As far as I know, I never met either, although I may have swapped punches or half-pints with one or other in the mid-Fifties, when I was one of the Daily Express interlopers in the back bar of the King and Keys. But what they both describe is the story of my life as well as theirs. Both books tell the story of ...”

“... conform. In such an environment gossip is an instrument with real teeth: your job and your home may depend upon it. Is gossip still a killer in the Western world? Liberalism has gone to a lot of trouble to draw its teeth, and to make sure that whatever you do you won’t have to suffer for it physically at society’s hands. In her novel The Groves of ...”

“... meaning etc, there will be no flow of intention, meaning, believing, hoping etc going on. The dog may respond to the behaviourist, but the behaviourist won’t respond to the dog’s response ... The behaviourist’s dog will not only seem stupid: she will be stupid. This testimony should not come as a surprise. There have been plenty of others like it ...”

“... and novelty: we see people we know in fresh contexts. The reader’s self-congratulation may be checked as he encounters characters beyond his ken, but this provokes the humbling and enhancing awareness that the range of texts that might be called literary is now so vast that no one could ever experience more than a fraction of it. The Leavisian hope ...”

“... Margaret Drabble’s later novels because they are so different from her earlier successes. She may have lost one public and not as yet entirely won over another. Her novel writing career began brilliantly and precociously with A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), published when she was 24. Since then, the preoccupations of her novels have generally kept pace with ...”

“... in achieving them; and the circumstances of its undoing’. Some historical works induce, whatever may have been the author’s intentions, a sense of inevitability – a feeling that events simply had to happen this way and that nothing could have diverted them from the course they actually took. Others constantly evoke questions of what might have been. This ...”

“... understand the significance of geological formations and the shapes of watercourses. Nowadays, he may overfly large sites in a helicopter. Feng shui means ‘wind and water’. Wind and water have formed the land, and are still at work on it and within it. They carry yin and yang, and chi. Chi can be blown away or leak away, but a site must be sufficiently ...”

“... would be graceless to grumble; and the cold eye seems disconcertingly aware of what our reactions may be, frequently addressing us as ‘Reader’, with a little flip of the wrist. In any case, the reader interested in the American stage and screen in the Thirties would certainly be gripped by the last quarter of the book, for Mary McCarthy’s first husband ...”