“... of the literary establishment’, are gunning for Larkin and Amis from all sides. With no Clive James or Martin Amis to stand up for the outlaw wordsmiths, the rescue operation, this time round, falls to Bradford, a professor at the University of Ulster who’s already written biographies of the Amises, father and son, plus Larkin, among others, and isn’t ...”

“... it is properly ripe’). This self-flagellating devotion accounts in large measure for Henry James’s view of Flaubert as the ‘novelists’ novelist’. He did not necessarily mean it as a compliment: Flaubert’s cultivation of craft, James thought, went hand in hand with a thinning of the human atmosphere. And it ...”

“... In a discussion​ of literary brothers Theroux mentions not just Thomas and Heinrich Mann and James and Stanislaus Joyce but Vidia and Shiva Naipaul, ‘both of whom I’d known’. At this moment the notional Jay Justus completely disappears within Paul Theroux, who had a famous if not enduring friendship with ...”

“... to the Hunger Strikers. ‘Heroic Styles’ (1984) proposes, equally provocatively, that Yeats and Joyce contributed to the logjam of the North. Both essays are vigilant, authoritative and tendentious, with Deane jesting about the Provos and diagnosing in Yeats – a romantic nationalist and a probable initiate of the Irish Republican Brotherhood – ‘the ...”

“... As Moore moved from writing a short story to writing a novel he wrote to his sister in Belfast (as Joyce wrote to his sister in Dublin looking for details of the city) asking for her memories of Miss Keogh, the visitor on whom Judith Hearne was based. However, he disregarded most of what he was told. (The original Miss Keogh had a job, for example.) He used ...”

“... almost everyone had access to a radio, though not in the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall and St James, where they were banned, or in the Palace of Westminster, where MPs needed to gather around an MP’s car parked outside if they wanted to hear a horse race or a cup tie. Under the Presbyterian influence of its first director general, Lord Reith, until 1938 ...”

“... without limit, and, lacking the certainty of a completed thing, will never entirely disappoint. James Agee had a fortunate career on the face of it, as a New York freelance for almost two decades and then as a screenwriter. One of the large talents of American writing in the 1940s, Agee was a Southerner, from Knoxville, Tennessee, who came North, stayed and ...”

“... complete works were concocted in a single afternoon and evening by two young Australian poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, as part of a plot to expose the obscurantism and meaninglessness of what passed for poetry under the aegis of Modernism. The Malley oeuvre was composed, they were later to reveal, with the aid of a chance collection of books ...”

“... else the book might be about. Some names, for example, seem to have more roots than others. When Joyce wrote Ulysses – another ambitious novel, like Mr Phillips, about a day in a man’s life: another novel about the way time employs people, whether they are employed or not – he didn’t call it ‘Bloom’ (or ‘The Blooms’). Or ‘Dedalus’. He ...”

“... had a slightly different temperament Buchan might have become a more complex kind of writer. Like Joyce, he read Maupassant and Flaubert as a teenager, worshipped Ibsen and Walter Pater as a student, and had a less than simple relationship with the cultural nationalism of the country in which he grew up. He got to know Henry ...”

“... appointed hour for his interview with an old queen in Deal, or with the executed traitor William Joyce’s daughter, by his second wife, in Gillingham. Carry On grotesques, professional alcoholics, poets suffering with their nerves, Broadstairs fascists, economic migrants of every stamp: all the devils are here. From the areal to Ariel, Seabrook casts Thanet ...”

“... dirty, without being able to pull it off. This is not Salinger speaking as Holden Caulfield, or Joyce speaking as Molly Bloom. It is certainly not Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, whom Adiga has claimed as his models in speaking for the underdog. What we are dealing with is someone with no sense of the texture of Indian ...”

“... be just as stimulating to their holders. The first two sections of the book deal with Yeats and Joyce, respectively; the third considers the literary consequences of exigencies occurring at one time or another; and the fourth contains spirited appraisals of literary figures like George Moore and James Stephens. Poetry in ...”

“... in his sleep.’ The Rover has indeed something of that verbal satisfaction which attended Henry James’s style, and grew on it and with it to the point where idea and intention became superfluous. ‘I’m never sure what it is I’m affirming,’ Conrad said despondently at this late time to a young French writer: but ‘affirmation’, in the sense that ...”

“... slow dynamic, we conjecture fragmentarily, our unique signatures – micro-chips, bezique, Joyce, teasmades, popes, string, architecture – doomed squiggles; still we weep, and think, notice that girl, or clean the sink. On the other hand, the grander manner, butchly colloquialised, pushes under our nose not merely experience but Waterman’s ...”