“... 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 ...”

“... always liked because it’s so unlike, uneasy, fierce and with me still at fifty looking quite young.He could be quite difficult, though I never found him so, and I always remember that in 1987, on the day Russell Harty was pilloried by the Sun for his patronage of rent boys, Snowdon rang and asked him to supper, a circumstance with which, had they ...”

“... mother worked as a maid. Her father was a black Frenchman from Guadeloupe, who died when she was young. She was one of four children in a single-parent family and spent periods in an orphanage. By the 1950s she was in Paris, where she found work as a PE instructor and enrolled at the school of dramatic arts in the rue Blanche. She was one of a group of ...”

“... been playing, with, responsible for their suppression, the commissioner of police for Bruges, one Roger de Bris. This gives quiet pleasure as it’s also the name of the transvestite stage director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, who makes his appearance bare-shouldered and in a heavy ball gown. 7 March. Our pillar box is now emptied at 9 a.m. not by the ...”