“... subjected to as a young man, describing the Vienna experiences as ‘an escape into reality’. Frank Kermode was listening and, much moved, wrote to Keller: ‘I filled out, with my own fears, the understatements of your talk. I suppose it must be that the school bully, the military sadist, and perhaps oneself in certain moments are, though insignificant ...”

“... the right to own guns ‘granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright’. But as Frank Smyth points out in his new history of the NRA, the organisation was actually founded because a group of Union Army veterans were dismayed by how few Americans actually knew how to shoot, particularly compared with Europeans. According to one of its ...”

“... use of it. It is a method of both inhabiting a character and keeping a distance: the author gets close to the subject by using the language the character himself might use, but refuses to contaminate all of her language thus. In Persuasion, Austen introduces Mr Shepherd like this: Mr Shepherd, a civil, cautious lawyer, who, whatever might be his hold or his ...”

“... into Manhattan to see plays in the $1.89 seats on Broadway, starting with The Diary of Anne Frank in 1956. ‘I remember thinking … Why couldn’t I play the part? I felt I could do it just as well as Susan Strasberg.’ Her talent, especially at the beginning, was a product of her ambition rather than the other way around; when she played a Roman ...”

“... man said. ‘Even Fee-agra.’ Uneven development to say the least. In Nazareth, Azmi had rented Frank Sinatra Hall for the evening. Sinatra was a long-time supporter of Israel who had apparently donated the money for a sports facility to be used by Jews and Arabs (Nazareth being the largest Arab town in Israel proper); later the facility was converted into ...”

“... such ... as to appear almost as a nervous “surrealism”’. ‘The American Poet’s Visit’, Frank Moorhouse’s funny account of provincial literary neurosis, had appeared in book form in 1972, and Peter Carey’s ‘American Dreams’, a post-Vietnam satire, in 1974. David Foster’s first novel, The Pure Land, came out in 1975, and, deceptively to one ...”

“... in which he lived was insufferable and that he must do what he could to save it. One or two of his close friends may have wondered whether a memoir should be written; and then put the idea from their minds, remembering those touching and boring notices in the Times which read: ‘NM writes: Colonel Jocelyn Lethbridge – always known to his friends as ...”

“... on, sustained by his mother’s favourite quotation (which stands as the novel’s epigraph): Anne Frank’s ‘In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.’ But, of course, Anne wrote that before the Germans got her. Thomas Keneally likes to run his fiction close to historical fact. An appended ...”

“... Rose which was to haunt him wherever he went, and in almost everything he wrote. ‘We were so close to each other, we had no need of others,’ he said many years later. When Rose was ill, he would be convinced that he, too, was ill. He loved her charm and her imagination, and watched her phobic retreat from life as though a part of himself was dying. By ...”

“... incestuous Dmitri), ‘who was very beautiful, unhappily married, passionate, high-living, and in close proximity to the grand duke for more than a decade was probably his lover, and he may have been the father of some of her children’. Close proximity is all the evidence Field can apparently muster for this theory ...”

“... would always be a part of her life. In 1973, Sartre told an interviewer that he had never been so close to any woman as he had been to le Castor. After his death, seven years later, Beauvoir wrote in La Cérémonie des Adieux: His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It was splendid enough in itself ...”

“... his destiny was the swimming pool that awaits Gatsby, or the vanishing of Dick Diver at the close of Tender Is the Night.Specktor starts his book with a comic-scary photomat picture of Fitzgerald spooking the camera, staring into his abyss. In the introduction, we get the outline of Specktor’s own broken life, with a wife, N, lost to another ...”

“... Doktor, Herr Privatdozent’): a bookworm, globetrotter, noticer who seems very close to the poet himself. The experience of reading him is very different, but the unself-conscious way with which Zagajewski handles this ‘I’ brings to mind Frank O’Hara. Certainly, it wouldn’t be easy to say who is ...”

“... The huts and their contents have been preserved intact, and the photographs show intensely close details of things long left behind: ragged shirts and socks hanging up on lines, wooden cases forming a wall, a jar of fruit salts, bottled redcurrants and gooseberries, tins of dried onions and parsnips, reams of unused paper on a shelf, a small open book ...”

“... reputation, but it was not until the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 – at the close of the Age of Aquarius, did we but know it – that he attained the worldwide renown, or infamy, as some might say, which he continues to enjoy and, if we are to believe The Anatomy Lesson and The Counterlife, to chafe under. Portnoy’s Complaint was the ...”