“... 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 ...”

“... role.Born to a valetudinarian father and a mother, Helvia, about whom little is known, the young Cicero received the education in Greek and Latin normal for a well-off child of the equestrian order. (Roman citizens who met a certain threshold of wealth were equestrians, able to pursue either the sort of political career in Rome that might win them ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... contains a good deal of ego-boosting romantic fantasy. A ravishing, sexually magnetic impoverished young woman lords it over a rich lover, half-mad with desire. On losing her virginity, the 15-year-old girl gains a sexual knowingness, an experience of jouissance as the Lacanians like to say, that makes her feel superior to other women, notably her mother. The ...”

“... being roughed up by plainclothes police in Brixton Market. He took out paper and pen and got the young man’s name and address to make sure there was a record. Four officers intervened and threw Johnson, along with the young man, into the back of a police van, where two Black women were already being held. They were taken ...”

“... this occasion. Monday 17 October was a different story: the Police were confronted by quite a few young men: we were not running away any more. Confrontation took place on the tip – miners versus police. For a brief time we had shown that the people of Grimethorpe had had enough. The police station was stoned, and windows broken. By three in the afternoon ...”

“... lover, and Rudolph Valentino’s; two of the men she loved died suddenly and tragically young; her lovers were gamblers, crooners, actors, aviators; her two husbands were aristocrats; she was by turns one of America’s most adored stars and a hate figure; Ronald Reagan invited her to his inauguration; she was Hitler’s favourite actress. Negri ...”

“... of the troubles, but it retains the drab charm of an insistent ordinariness. It is a place where young people worry about boyfriends and clothes (‘I was looking at a suit the other day. It was made up of lovely autumny shades’) and jobs and getting away, as they would in any other stifling province that was also home. Men snap and demand service; women ...”

“... to arrest and prosecution. Bartlett describes the case of a pseudonymous British man called Michael, whom he interviewed for the book. In his fifties, happily married with a grown-up daughter, Michael protests, quite genuinely it seems, that he is ‘a very ordinary, heterosexual bloke. I was never ...”

“... If you took​ only the subject matter of Michael Ondaatje’s novels into account, you would expect him to be an austere and even punishing writer. He chooses the darkest material, chronicles passages of life that would test the most resilient cheerfulness. Coming through Slaughter (1976) is loosely based on the tragic life of the jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden, who died in an asylum in New Orleans ...”