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“... of her native country.’ By this time she was playing Lady Anne and Desdemona to Edmund Kean’s Richard III and Othello. Star quality, however, was not at all what was looked for in those who played opposite a superstar like Kean. She was prized as ‘a decorative utility player’, and as a ‘sweet but ... somewhat passive stage personality’. It must ...”

“... tells us more than we ought to know for sure about the range of things to follow. This is too nice a book to be quite what, as I understand her, the author intended it to be. The energy and ambition of Herself in Love, a collection of 13 stories by Marianne Wiggins, are most strikingly exhibited in the book’s variety of styles and situations. A waitress ...”

“... glow. These are not the uncorseted, feelgood ramblings of Sixties survivors (Howard Marks, Richard Neville et al), but the in-your-face, out-of-your-skull, trust-nobody, swallow-anything limbo that acted, it has become clear, as a curtain-raiser to the free-market excesses that were to follow. Punk auditioned the dark night of Keith Joseph and Norman ...”

“... for a spell in London found themselves next to people who had gone to convent school and Rada, nice people but different, loosely self-conscious and super-educated and social in a way the Northerners had never seen. I met Alan Sillitoe in the 1990s, and he was still shy, still standing at the edge of the party. But it was Storey who most powerfully ...”

“... she mentioned Maureen Duffy’s Capital) whose characters used public transport – it made a nice change. Late in life, Alec makes vivid mental notes on his fellow passengers while travelling on the tube (‘Square-faced pasty white boy, with swags of beard at the corners of his jaw, like a playing-card king’s’). At the same age Jo, riding a 54 ...”

“... made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the finger-man for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making.When ...”

“... Pinocchio that it is Collodi’s original that has come to seem like the revised version. As Richard Wunderlich and Thomas Morrissey write in their study of Pinocchio in America, ‘Pinocchio’ Goes Postmodern (2002), Collodi’s novel is now merely a ‘version among versions’: an adult version in their view, unsuitable for children, because no ...”

“... Purity. Man Two is successful, manipulative, priapic, with an aridity to his heart: the rock star Richard Katz in Freedom, the ‘famous internet outlaw’ Andreas Wolf in Purity. What seemed in The Corrections like a generous sharing of perspective between characters who, being related, can’t avoid acknowledging that they see things differently – the ...”

“... pursue migrants attempting the perilous journey through the mountains. The administrative court in Nice has ruled against the prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes on at least four occasions, finding him responsible for ‘illegal practices regarding migrants’ – notably unaccompanied minors and asylum-seekers who have been denied protection and ...”

“... self-involvement doesn’t grate. Narcissism comes in many flavours, and Ellis’s has a nice soothing vocal quality, perfect for earbud listening on long rides. No matter how mellow Ellis manages to sound, however, he retains a knack for maddening people, for saying just the right wrong thing to make his legions of detractors swirl like ...”

“... nations was a glamorous thing to do: now the Agency has all but disappeared. With the advent of Richard Nixon, who sought the segregationist vote by emulating some of George Wallace’s worst traits, all this changed. Wallace had campaigned against ‘pointy-headed bureaucrats’ and Nixon derided government workers, though they kept the Government going ...”

“... downright good a story … Too oily.’ ‘I was only thinking last night,’ she wrote in 1921 to Richard Murry, ‘people have hardly begun to write yet – now I mean prose … Aren’t they still cutting up sections rather than tackling the whole of a mind? … With all that one knows how much does one not know? … The unknown is far, far greater than the ...”

“... of the exquisite divinatory intelligence required to make proper use of that knowledge’. Nice work if you can do it, as Cole Porter didn’t quite say. Kermode is not Housman and not a diviner. But he does devote much exquisite intelligence to matters of divination – even and especially of secular affairs. He would like to believe we could do ...”

“... and wild-westish the process became, take a look at a book by a former Texas mortgage broker, Richard Bitner, called Confessions of a Sub-Prime Lender.† The invention which made it possible for the lending to become so reckless was securitisation: the process by which loans were added together and sold on to other institutions as packages of debt. This ...”

“... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit ...”