“... structure and life of our family units are changing. Marriage is popular – often contracted at a young age, and often not very durable. But in spite of the present ease of entering and leaving wedlock, 16 per cent of births, 99,000 children a year, are illegitimate. Yet only three and a half thousand of these come on the adoption market. A lot of family life ...”

“... latest collaboration: a disguised, disjointed autobiography. At the same time his old comrade, Roger Daltrey, advertises credit cards on television, which is another way of confounding the philosophy of a group that had hoped to die before getting old. As if to cock a snook – if cocking snooks is something technology is capable of – the longest ...”

“... New Poems (1908); Duino Elegies (1923), Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). His Letters to a Young Poet (1903) have also been treasured by several generations of readers, often readers who are not otherwise much interested in modern poets. This scheme and these dates suggest a perfectionist writer, writing only sparely, much at the mercy of his ...”

“... the price that saves Marlowe from contamination. ‘You’re all alone in the dark,’ a drunken Roger Wade says to Marlowe, referring to the indifferent woman hiding within his beautiful wife. ‘Baby wants to go bye-bye.’ Only Marlowe’s detachment saves him from Wade’s fate. The fire that Cissy warmed her hands at was burning witches. Women are the ...”

“... lack of large-mindedness ‘does not prevent Updike from imagining him largely’, as Roger Sale put it in the New York Times, though they are stretched when very literary formulations are meant to be Ben’s unspoken words: ‘Each tree stands in a ragged oval of leaf-fall, summer’s discarded yellow petticoat.’ This seems too sharply ...”

“... again, appeared as a bartender in Thunder and Lightning (like Cockfighter, it was produced by Roger Corman), remarried once more and, in 1984, published Miami Blues, the first of the Hoke Moseley novels. He wrote three more over the next four years. He died in 1988. The Moseley novels can’t be called mystery novels in the traditional sense. For a ...”

“... Both versions have the allusion I have just spotted to the song ‘Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life’ by Young and Herbert (from Naughty Marietta). ‘At last I’ve found thee,’ the line continues, picking up the idea of finding pain when paradise is lost, or has lost us. ‘Mistery’ suggests missing mastery as well as what we don’t know. Another ...”

“... were everywhere, remaking a bad world. But I knew the cast of characters. Emily, me; Gerald, Roger, my boyfriend and free-school organiser with the children from the free school. The Survivors. Just a few. But what can you do with a benighted world? Only the ones who can see will see. It’s a shame but you can’t save everyone. But actually, I didn’t ...”

“... enviable capacity to shapeshift, but not so much charm, or humility, as some who nevertheless die young, younger, with children and grandchildren to leave. But that more than anything made me tear up during the tribute programmes. What distressed him most about dying, said this icon of narcissism once, was the thought of missing watching his daughter grow ...”

“... amused himself in the evenings, when drunk, by cutting down the flag with rifle shots) and a young man “of good family”, aged 24, who had been guilty of two murders.’ Such passages made his critics fume, but the larger fact was Suret’s extraordinary scholarship – his books are mines of social and economic information. It was bad enough that he ...”

“... of James Shirley; the Wales of Morgan Llwyd, Henry Vaughan and Katherine Philips; the Munster of Roger Boyle; the Edinburgh of Sir George Mackenzie and William Cleland; the Derry of William Philips. Its historical scope is just as broad. After a final chapter on Daniel Defoe’s activities in Edinburgh in 1706-7, where he intrigued, lobbied and proselytised ...”

“... about lying in the long grass at the edge of the playground with his friends Richard and Roger, ‘trying to fart at will’; about avoiding Julie, ‘who liked to pounce on innocent-looking kids and ask them the Question – “D’you know what having it off means?”’; about the time Francis ‘crept onto the landing and kissed Aslan’s ...”

“... he cited, Updike and Philip Roth, are still displaying their self-absorbency and depriving tender young empaths of valuable column inches. With an almost audible sigh, Updike concedes that the pups have a point. ‘He or she may feel, as the grey-haired scribes of the day continue to take up space and consume the oxygen in the increasingly small room of the ...”

“... suspect they were also practising some form of environmental management, setting fires to promote young shoots, building small dams to retain and divert water, and undertaking selective culls among wild herds to sustain animal populations. The key to food security was diversity: if, by chance, a particular foodstuff gave out, there were always more to choose ...”

“... and their cubs and regretted having to stop reading when her therapist called her into his room. Roger MacKinnon, who was then 73, was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst once described by the New York Times as ‘John Wayne in a blue suit’. He taught at Columbia and had co-authored a book about the usefulness of the interview in clinical situations. Didion ...”