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“... disconcerting new novel starts on a note of thrillerish urgency. Molly, at home alone with her small children, hears footsteps in the other room. She clasps them to her, though she needs to move away from them if she is to defend them. Ben, the baby, is too young to feel a sense of emergency, but Viv, at three, is old enough both to co-operate and to do ...”

“... a more general difficulty: that of setting up a new order in the old vocabulary of Leavis and Stephen I-think-continually-of-those-who-were-truly-great Spender. Charlotte Mew, who was born on the edge of the square (and rather surprisingly does have a plaque), might have prompted some different adjectives. I wish Wade had said more about her unsettling ...”

“... writes. Once he was in his late teens, it became fashionable to fall in love with Freud. When Stephen Spender, according to himself, told T.S. Eliot that he had succumbed, Eliot said: ‘There’s nothing I understand more.’ Spender and Freud spent some time in a cottage in Wales when Freud was 18 and produced a little book of drawings and poems ...”

“... play for the Saturday, and if they substituted the one proposed to them ‘they should have small or no company’ – audience – ‘at it.’ The objection was overcome by the offer of £2 above the box-office take – more, it has been estimated, than the normal yield of a full house. The play was duly performed. What was the play? Five descriptions ...”

“... up to £395,000), this is a tremendous example of aspiration coming to fruition,’ says Stephen Oakes, area director for English Partnerships. Inch by inch, the working canal between Limehouse Basin and the Islington tunnel has become a ladder of glass, connecting Docklands with the northern reaches of the City. Footballers, with loose change to ...”

“... good fellow. In practice, of course, it is a law of club life the world over that, apart from very small clubs indeed, no member can know every other member even by sight. Dublin’s large, ancient, honourable and flourishing (well, anyway, ancient) boozing club The Wamps – writers, actors, musicians, painters, sculptors – offers one striking exception to ...”

“... consumption and fossil-fuel burning in the world’s richest countries.The environmental historian Stephen Pyne calls our era the ‘pyrocene’, a global regime of burning: coal and oil, agricultural land and forest, bush and wetland, most of it planned. The Anthropocene, Pyne says, implies dominion over nature. He prefers to emphasise the fact that, wherever ...”

“... jury found that detectives didn’t carry out checks that could have prevented the serial killer Stephen Port from murdering at least three of his victims. The victims’ families believe that this lack of care was motivated in part by homophobia – Port met his male targets on dating apps. Detectives also failed to take such basic steps as running his name ...”

“... empty vowel turning Garb and Brand into every-and-no-woman and man, and offering, as a bonus, a small gasp of astonishment. But once you start to think of them as Greta and Marlon you’re back with a bump to the absurdity of real life. There’s nothing more certain to wreck a lazy daydream of being taken roughly into the arms of your chosen idol than the ...”

“... of justice of quite a different kind might be about to take place’ – namely, the trial of Stephen Ward, the osteopath, on dubious charges of living on immoral earnings. In the resulting book the author first expressed his conviction that the adversarial style of criminal justice as practised in British courts was all wrong and that if the truth ...”

“... from whom we obtain cure of night-terrors and the milk of paradise, a magic woman sheltering this small creature, ourselves, obliged to live in the country of the giants. Mothers and fathers can and do maim and kill; and children have their moments of fear with even the kindest of parents. But the man’s power is evident: the woman’s is stranger.Behind her ...”

“... A cluster of lights shone out of the dark, as cold and distant as a galaxy. Then it was gone.’ Stephen Dedalus has been repeatedly alluded to, and Atlas leaves us wondering whether his Icarus soars, plunges, or merely dangles after the fashion of his favourite novelist’s favourite man. The last, I guess. The form of The Great Pretender is Portnoyesque ...”

“... yet the Cossacks are seductive too: The First Squadron is in my fenced garden. Night, I have a small lamp on my table, horses are quietly snorting, they’re all Kuban Cossacks here, they eat together, sleep together, cook together, a splendid silent comradeship. They are all more or less peasants, in the evening they sing songs that sound like church ...”

“... peren Almost meaninglessly vulnerable To men who hold them with incomprehension Softened by love, small crania nestle in tweed Until a woman comes, a maid, a nurse With her efficient, separating smile Allowing cigar smoke, whiskies, broadsheet papers Breastfeeding women soldier Lovingly, intimately, hurt Night after night in private dawn campaigns, Babies in ...”

“... cousins, each running to about 35 pages. (‘In lesser hands, these scenes would be a trudge,’ Stephen King wrote in a review. ‘There’s a delirious intensity to them that seems to be French’s sole property.’) Dominic, cocky and boorish, tormented them both: he spread a rumour that Leon, who is gay, had Aids, and may have tried to sodomise him with ...”