“... 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 ...”

“... code. This allegiance also cut them off from the giants of British Modernism – Yeats, Lawrence, Joyce, Pound, Eliot – all of whom chose to distance themselves from the war effort. One of Lehmann’s major themes is this profound isolation of the war poets from the cultural and political life of the home country. Though the guns of Flanders could regularly ...”

“... When he refers to Heidegger, he doesn’t mean the philosopher but the operatic impresario John James Heidegger (c.1665-1749). In Literature and Popular Culture in 18th-Century England, as in his Grub Street (1972) and its abridged version Hacks and Dunces (1980), he proposes to describe ‘how things were’ or how they seemed to be to the people who lived ...”

“... was a new dichotomy, between the ‘tradesmen’ in Gissing’s novel and ‘artists’ like Henry James and some of the characters in the series of short stories he wrote to define the author’s place in a society that was cultivating the habit of regarding literature as a fine art: the writer as artist and respected public figure, not a lowly ...”

“... traffic, occasionally lost, and at the end of ‘Fastest on Earth’ she gets a parking fine in St James’s Square. Many of the pleasures are urban and precisely located in the area around Macaulay’s Bloomsbury flat off Chancery Lane, but there are rural pleasures too. In ‘Easter in the Woods’ she contemplates a finely detailed landscape as she lingers ...”

“... one reason he slotted so well into its pages. His heroes were the great humourists of the 1940s, James Thurber and S.J. Perelman, and, like them, he often wrote of beleaguered men who struggle with a world that seems to be ...”

“... something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously.In the ...”

“... this is precisely the reason they cannot be pineapples. The most they can do is create what Henry James called the ‘air of reality’ of pineapples. In this sense, all realist art is a kind of con trick – a fact that is most obvious when the artist includes details that are redundant to the narrative (the precise tint and curve of a moustache, let us ...”

“... Everett, and making a tacit contrast between his work and that of other contemporary writers, that Joyce Carol Oates tweeted about the ‘wan little husks of “autofiction” with space between paragraphs to make the book seem longer’.Oates was complaining not just about bad taste but what it serves to exclude. Everett is routinely described as underrated ...”

“... typist, there. Donald Parr was a Yorkshireman, the son of a Methodist preacher. His wife, Joyce, whom Parr describes as ‘very bright’, was brought up an only child in Gloucestershire, the daughter of ‘a real Cheltenham lady’. ‘They were very different people, my parents.’ On holiday in the Pyrenees in 1962 the differences are not on ...”

“... brings aspects of his work into sharper focus without unduly cleaning up its oddness and irony. James Gordon Farrell – Jim to his friends – turns out to have had more in common with J.G. Ballard than with Paul Scott, George MacDonald Fraser, M.M. Kaye and other writers of 1970s bestsellers with imperial themes. Like the empty swimming-pools and ...”