“... Certainly, I was embarrassed and tied in knots by the corniness of the whole performance. Roger didn’t mind, he always enjoyed me disconcerting his parents. By the time of my second marriage, well into my dog days, I had enough confidence to ask the registrar who was to perform the ceremony if I could just say ‘Yes’ when it got to the bit where ...”

“... the literary marketplace do so. His father’s adult life, too, had been a hunt for preferment. Roger Sterne, an army ensign, failed to achieve promotion until a few months before his death. After dragging his family around Ireland with his regiment, he sent the ten-year-old Laurence to be looked after by his brother’s family near Halifax. He died of ...”

“... that the lines were intended for an unfinished play or written as a lyric to Fanny Brawne, the young woman who did not take Keats’s hand in marriage because of his dismal prospects. Yet even if the fragment has Fanny in view as ‘thou’, ‘thine heart’ and so on, we cannot escape its address. When Keats writes ‘– see, here it is/I hold it ...”

“... should remember the bronze virility’ of Arno Breker’s statues, ‘the browned bodies of young workers’ and ‘the guards mounting watch over the memorial of Nazi martyrdom at Munich’, and reclaim ‘what was positive within the Nazi movement’. Hitler, Knight went on, was a ‘burning positive’ who ‘may have been absolutely needed for ...”

“... 22 June they were forced to surrender.A few days later in Nancy, the occupying forces arrested a young medical orderly while he was trying to escape into the countryside on an old bicycle without tyres. He was stocky and fit, but somewhat shortsighted, which had disqualified him from active military service. Along with more than a thousand other prisoners he ...”

“... Jenny. Diski feels more accurately like me, though it is an entirely invented name to which both Roger-the-Ex and I changed when we got married. There was a gasp and then a brief silence.‘How are you?’I was 11 when she had last known me, but what else was there to say?‘I’m well, thank you.’I explained that I was a writer these days and was thinking ...”

“... with Nehru, who was in prison. When Nehru came to tea her father introduced her, saying: ‘My young daughter, alas, is a great admirer of yours.’ In a later exchange of letters Nehru explained Indian history to her, and told her what a good thing it was that she was being radicalised. Scared that her father might see these letters, she destroyed ...”

“... dead beneath its black shadow.’In order to write the third chapter of the novel, in which the young Hyacinth Robinson is taken to visit his French mother, who is serving a life sentence for his father’s murder, James visited Millbank Prison by the Thames: ‘a worse act of violence’, he called it, ‘than any it was erected to punish’. Hyacinth is ...”

“... in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor (Roger Livesey) had been shot at Shere, a picturesque hamlet below Newlands Corner where we’d sometimes go on walks. Livesey watches the goings-on in the village via a camera obscura, though why he does this isn’t explained or the workings of the device ...”

“... Among the many delights to be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse is a squib by Thomas Holcroft, provoked by some disparaging remarks Voltaire made about Shakespeare. In fact, Voltaire was perfectly ready to concede that Shakespeare was possessed of real genius, though of a rough and ready kind, but in denying that he had ‘so much as a Spark of good Taste, or knew one Rule of the Drama’, and other such remarks, he scandalised what Gibbon once described as the ‘idolatry for the Gigantic Genius of Shakespeare which is inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of an Englishman ...”

“... An epigraph to the screenplay of True Romance, attributed to ‘French critics on the films of Roger Corman’, says: ‘His films are a desperate cry from the heart of a grotesque fast-food culture.’ In Tarantino the cry is not desperate, and his characters are capable of quoting this line as a joke. In Natural Born Killers a pretentious film director ...”

“... be, if you were anything other than alone.’ Quoting his lines in a letter to his painter friend Roger Hilton, Graham added, typically: ‘OK OK a bit overblown speech, but it is approximately true, if I can say that.’He began to try, in the poems he wrote in the 1940s, to make the difficulty of communication the whole point, transmuting his defensive ...”

“... and almost always for a man: ‘Poor Ted.’ Over the years the name changed, ‘Poor Roger’ (my first husband), ‘Poor Peter’ (her son), ‘Poor Martin’ (or any other man who she thought had been treated badly by a woman). But as far as I was concerned the death of Sylvia was before my time, if only by weeks, in the same way that the end ...”

“... Mme Proust stammers her quotation, Marcel interjects that he can’t bear to be without her. Roger Duchêne coolly insists that this is just a draft of a novel: ‘A beautiful scene, a too beautiful scene. The notebooks are not a place of confessions but of sketches of scenes for the work to come.’ Jean-Yves Tadié doesn’t mention the scene at ...”

“... more Newman ran down the geometric abstraction of Mondrian as well as the formalist criticism of Roger Fry; he saw a ‘disdain for the self’ in both. ‘The new painter,’ Newman insisted, ‘is concerned with his subject matter, with his thought.’ The term ‘plasmic image’ didn’t catch on, but he had more luck with ‘ideographic picture’, the ...”