“... denunciations. The New Republic of 31 October ran a piece by Murray followed by 18 criticisms. Stephen Jay Gould spoke out in the New Yorker of 28 November. I especially recommend Alan Ryan’s analysis in the New York Review of Books of 17 November, followed in the 1 December issue by Charles Lane’s examination of some of the sources of statistical ...”

“... the publication of Alex Garland’s first novel, The Beach, one of cinema’s most fashionable young directors (Danny Boyle) and its most adored male star (Leonardo Di Caprio) are about to make a film version of it, a remarkable achievement for an author of 28, but in other ways an inevitable one. Few novels are so influenced by film as this one, in its ...”

“... from Salford to Whitefield via Prestwich. The Jacobsons evidently made it to Prestwich. The young Howard went to grammar school and read English at Cambridge. His subsequent academic career started at Selwyn College, diverted to Sydney University and ended, fifteen years on, at Wolverhampton Polytechnic: a downward mobility which Jacobson seems to have ...”

“... A cluster of lights shone out of the dark, as cold and distant as a galaxy. Then it was gone.’ Stephen Dedalus has been repeatedly alluded to, and Atlas leaves us wondering whether his Icarus soars, plunges, or merely dangles after the fashion of his favourite novelist’s favourite man. The last, I guess. The form of The Great Pretender is Portnoyesque ...”

“... the writers we read, we do not believe such things about relative strangers – that beautiful young man at the gym, that horrible troll there – and neither, as a rule, do we believe them about celebrities. We believe from reading him that Oscar Wilde – in person – was both superficial and profound. Or we believe that Roland Barthes in person ...”

“... peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. Orthography became important: Geoffrey or Jeffrey, Ann or Anne, Stephen or Steven. Girls’ names were especially given to whim and proliferation. In the 1930s, my mother was christened Doreen because a Russian acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ever known. This nice Doreen seems ...”

“... Hero’ is the source of Joyce’s title for the forerunner to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘Stephen Hero’. Turpin is no hero to James Sharpe, who sets out to cut him down to size, just another ‘callous, brutal and violent’ criminal, an ‘unpleasant thug’, hardly distinguishable from so many ...”

“... when all-night parties, partner-swapping, drugs and drink characterised the lives of his wild young friends, Ashton was too ambitious to be led far astray. He began to cultivate influential people: Ashley Dukes (Rambert’s husband), the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant, Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia ...”

“... selection, the latest in a series of Prion Humour Classics which includes Saki’s contemporaries Stephen Leacock, Jerome K. Jerome and the Grossmiths. Saki lends a caustic distinction to that company. His real name was Hector Hugh Munro and he was born in Burma in 1870, the son of an inspector-general of the Burma police. Two years later his mother died ...”

“... What​ became of his face? In his memorial address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image of Wystan … of course one with which you are all familiar: the famous poet with the face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines ...”

“... But although his air of superiority, or his superiority, annoyed or hurt some people when he was young in Cambridge and Ceylon, and later as well, he obviously grew much more tolerant as time went on, as befitted his adherence to socialist doctrines which he might call peculiar but which seem entirely honourable, sincere and considered. Still, there remained ...”

“... interest the Sunday Times, where I was then working. There was another guest, an aristocratic young man from the City whose role appeared to be that of prompting the MI5 officer – for that is what I took the man from ‘the office’ to be – when he hesitated over a real or pretended indiscretion. The conversation was all to do with the extent to ...”

“... the fastest crossing, which the Lusitania snatched from the Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907. I was too young to remember the loss of White Star’s Titanic, but not too young to remember the torpedoing in 1915 of the Lusitania. Wars end with a forfeiture and redistribution not only of cities but of floating cities. So, in ...”

“... Katherine Mansfield’s​ short story ‘Bliss’ is a jewel-like study of a young woman, Bertha, poised unknowingly at a moment of crisis in her life. (It’s interesting not least for what it prefigures of Mrs Dalloway.) Bertha, preparing for a dinner party she will give that evening, arranges the fruit she has ordered: tangerines, ‘apples stained with strawberry pink ...”

“... to them. This tactic of self-subsuming has worked for other writers, but in the hands of the young Merrill, in ‘The Broken Bowl’ for example, it produces verse that is impacted and evasive: The splinters rainbowing ruin on the floor Cut structures in the air, Mark off, like eyes or compasses, a face Of mathematic fixity, spotlight Within whose ...”