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“... we are about to set off for the crematorium in the pouring rain when as we turn the car round a young pheasant skitters across the road. Nothing unusual in that except that this pheasant is pure white. I’m not given to a belief in signs or portents but it’s nevertheless quite cheering to feel that she’s still around. The service in the village church ...”

“... a brigade on the now entrenched Western Front, and had tried unsuccessfully to get this brilliant young French-speaking officer to be his brigade major. Churchill had written to Clemmie, ‘I like him very much and he is entirely captivated,’ and in October 1916 he was writing to ‘My dear Louis’, who was recuperating after his last wound, in very ...”

“... and nobs that he owned newspapers to make political propaganda. The life which Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie have written begins with a piece of elegant writing, like a dream sequence. It is an unpublished piece written by Davie as a very young Observer reporter. It incorporates Raymond, Beaverbrook’s camp valet who ...”

“... imaginative benefits, weakens any intended social point. So it is no surprise that Stuart Hood and Michael Dibdin concern themselves with the present state of society and morality via Science Fiction and a crime story. Both have produced ingenious – indeed, immensely clever – fictions. Hood’s Peter Sinclair, a battered ‘historical materialist’ (aka ...”

“... Reprint Library, with (as readers of the London Review of Books will know) an Introduction by Michael Holroyd, which identifies ‘David Peterley’ as an artistic fiction and argues a persuasive case for the book’s worth and raison d’être. Let me dwell a moment or two on the ‘crime’ aspect. Publishers like to exploit the weakness for mystery of ...”

“... It is easy to loathe Michael Howard. It is less easy – because more intimidating in its implications – to loathe him for the right reasons. His record as Home Secretary before Her Majesty’s judges is appalling. He has lost a succession of cases to do with prisoners, immigrants and criminal injuries compensation ...”

“... twists. Finally, the meditations on race, sex and the loss of political innocence of the novel’s young male narrator, offspring of a black father and white mother, take the work far beyond the category of topical satire. Anonymous has been strongly influenced by All the King’s Men (1946). His narrator, Henry Burton, the preppy, intellectual grandson of a ...”

“... Wairimu is on her way to fetch water, when a bend in the path brings her face to face with a young man. The young man is Waitito, son of Njuguna, and his effect on the 17-year-old Wairimu is immediate and deep. The nature of the encounter is not made clear. For Wairimu it has a visionary, fairy-tale quality, and ...”

“... by the market, still a fake? What does intention matter if your audience doesn’t care about it? Michael ‘Butcher’ Boone, one of the two narrators of Theft, is a once famous Australian artist, newly divorced and down on his luck. His work is now very unfashionable, and he has retreated to a rustic house in New South Wales owned by his patron. Here, ...”

“... the novel begins with the failed effort of Hickman and his flock to warn Sunraider that a young black man is out to assassinate him. Organised as a set of flashbacks from the bedside colloquy between Hickman and the dying Sunraider, the rest of the novel fills in the history of the two men. If Callahan is right about the material now called ...”

“... work had been done and everybody’s summer wasn’t being wasted in a Norfolk hell-hole.’ Michael, her husband and the children’s stepfather, is a university lecturer, who plans to spend the summer having illicit sex whenever possible with his latest favourite student, Philippa Knott, whose mobile number he keyed into his phone before the end of ...”

“... also shows beautifully on film and still photographs, from the waggingly imperialled steely young man (‘one of Ezra’s more savage disciples’, Yeats called him) posing in Rapallo in 1930 or 1931 on the cover of A Strong Song Tows Us and the New Directions Complete Poems, to the waggingly eyebrowed, scruff-bearded, snaggle-toothed, twinkling-eyed ...”

“... however, was the curious legend of Sappho’s disastrous passion for Phaon, a handsome young ferryman whose rejection of her is said to have prompted her suicide. (In the classic account, beset by love-anguish, she is supposed to have leapt from the Leucadian cliffs into the roiling sea below.) Ovid dramatised the suicide story in the Heroides (a ...”

“... among neglected or un-neglected writers. Early in Chao’s book, Onetti recounts the visit of a young man who tells him that his best book is Los Adioses (Farewells), 1954. Onetti says this is his own favourite too, but critics have preferred El Astillero (The Shipyard), 1961. ‘No, absolutely not,’ the young man ...”

“... time for a new look. The novelty consists mainly in the use made of some political writings of the young Lamb, who is now more firmly placed than before in the culture of metropolitan radical journalism, with its dash of Godwinian ideas and mild Jacobin sympathies. And she gives very careful accounts of Lamb’s friendships; his various journalistic ...”