“... book which infers the motives – generally ignoble ones – of the authors under discussion. The death of the author has occurred, in this case both literally and theoretically, and Howell can divine whatever motive and meaning she pleases. Was Dickens spiteful about the American national character because of its publishers’ practices? Was that ‘flat ...”

“... agencies looks real, and all the rest looks like fantasy. Like the young Michael Innes, Sarah Caudwell both respects and flouts the conventions of the detective story. Thus was Adonis murdered is a very modern novel using the archaic epistolary method of Clarissa: aptly enough, because it has as much to do with seduction as with detection, and ...”

“... to learn more about his father’s role in such disappearances. Eventually, after his father’s death, he confronts his mother with the familiar question: ‘What did Father do during the war?’ The answers are too uncertain to be satisfying. He served on ‘the military court in Strasbourg’; among other things, he once sentenced an officer to ...”

“... placed under acute strain by Edward’s unkingly conduct in the few months since his father’s death – his feckless hedonism, his dangerous political naivety and his neglect of the more tedious duties of his role. His abdication – an entirely characteristic act of childish stubbornness – was an unprecedented shock to a system founded upon ...”

“... publishing). His Melanesian opposite number, the witch doctor and shaman Njiru, who foresees the death of his beliefs, tells Rivers his secrets so that they can be carried off in words, and survive. The first-person written account that Prior is given in The Ghost Road had to be invented, because none of the natives of no man’s land wrote about it in this ...”

“... Department of Correction. All of them were being held on Rikers Island. Herman Diaz, 52, choked to death on an orange; several other detainees tried to revive him but no guard came to his aid. Dashawn Carter, 25, hanged himself two days after returning to Rikers from a state psychiatric hospital. George Pagan, 48, was plainly ill during the nine days he spent ...”

“... dirty socks, Woodbines – the mood is ominous. The poem ends with a reference to the death of Edward Thomas. Lewis himself was killed in 1944.Sarah Moss’s new novel is set in a lochside cabin park in the Trossachs. The poem behind its title is William Watson’s ‘The Ballad of Semmerwater’, about a city ...”

“... in what her Lover says to her, than the good Opinion her Passion has made her conceive of him’); Sarah Fielding’s deeply unpleasant David Simple (1744), in which characters with names like Spatter, Lady Know-All and Mr Varnish assail the gormless hero until he drops dead of despair; and Sarah Scott’s thoroughly ...”

“... stripped down her own world to its bare essentials, and then painted it. From 1904 until Rodin’s death in 1917, John was living such an intense emotional life that she almost lost her sense of herself. It was in her capacity as a model rather than as a fellow artist that she met Rodin, and although she would show him her drawings and sketches and ask for his ...”

“... been seized by the monument-building urge, they simply wouldn’t exist. Whatever else it may be, Sarah Lawrence is William Van Duzer Lawrence’s tribute to his wife, Sarah; Vassar is Matthew Vassar’s tribute to himself. Smith and Williams, in Massachusetts, sprang up to commemorate their donors. But for sheer ...”

“... a more manageable single individual of whom he would make a nation. It could be argued that Sarah was a necessary part of the package. She was already married to Abraham, and is claimed by all three religions as their matriarch. But there’s little point in pussy-footing about: the Scriptures – prepare yourselves – do not promote feminism. You can ...”

“... feeling of menace: ‘It took no more than a few days to unravel the mystery of Charles Emery’s death.’ Hardly any effort is made to keep the reader in suspense. Banks manages to find out that his father was in trouble before his disappearance: the wholesale merchant he worked for handled opium as well as tea. This doesn’t come as a surprise; the bad ...”

“... William Laud. Gaskill exaggerates when he says that in the 1630s ‘Puritans were jailed or put to death,’ but the regime was sufficiently hostile that Pynchon, like thousands of other Puritans, despaired of the prospects for the godly in England. In 1629 he became active in the Massachusetts Bay Company headed by John Winthrop, a Suffolk man. A year later ...”

“... hero, when a wrecked health service allows a loved friend to die, can only describe the cause of death as ‘the same thing that gets everybody in the end: a combination of circumstances’. Cancer, in this case, plus the undiluted philosophy of the market. This world and this mentality are not gone from Coe’s new novel, The House of Sleep. They are ...”

“... termagants, for example, of whom a much-tried man could say: ‘It is difficult to believe that death can stifle them; one imagines them on the threshold of some other world, sounding con fusion among unhappy spirits who hoped to have found peace.’ The tone is swashbuckling, and with reason. It would be inaccurate to say that Gissing’s married life was ...”