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“... pamphlets: in 1520 the Oxford bookseller John Dorne had A Little Gest of Robin Hood for tuppence, Robert the Devil for thruppence. Orme makes the suggestion that cheap ‘jest-books’, short collections of riddles and stories, can be seen as forerunners of children’s comics.Around the age of seven, a privileged few boys would move on to grammar ...”

“... exalted calling, and his reunion episode with Jay McInerney was nostalgic and sweet, like Ross and Chandler of Friends getting together after so many years. Ellis has found his midlife métier. Even when he can’t resist turning the interview back to himself, the self-conscious self-involvement doesn’t grate. Narcissism comes in many flavours, and Ellis’s ...”

“... by causing readers to think less of his character (as readers may have been led to think less of Robert Frost), but simply by deflecting the focus of people’s attention. Rereading Cheever, it’s hard now not to be on the qui vive for signs of how his complicated, compulsively deceiving sexuality enters the texture of his work: at the time of the ...”

“... an America weltering in its crime. There is no battle, because the bad guys have won. In Raymond Chandler’s novels, the mean streets were patrolled if not policed by crusaders upholding impeccable private moralities (‘shop-soiled Galahad’ is how the ironic Marlowe describes himself). Alfred Harbage once calculated that seven out of ten people in ...”

“... in the US – the giant statues of the Confederate heroes Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are said to form the largest sculpture in the world – served as an Olympic site. Thanks to Jim Crow, black Atlantans were denied entrance when Joel Chandler Harris’s home was turned into a museum, even though ...”

“... Ellroy’s dramatic arc flings him back into an earlier era. Like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler – to whom he is an obvious heir – Ellroy comes to the hardboiled school out of the raw life he seeks to fictionalise. But unlike theirs, Ellroy’s life – considered as the test-bed of his work – is absurdly over-determining. To have your mother ...”

“... novel’. The smoky romanticism of the quest story, brought to literary respectability by Raymond Chandler, has collapsed into self-parody and a decadent excess of style. A cinema of ghosts represented by the cruel distance between The Big Sleep as realised by Howard Hawks in 1946, from a script by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, and the ...”

“... Robert Stone​ was the feral child of American literature. He arrived in the world with no one to explain or defend him, except his mother, Gladys. About her we know only stray bits of personal history. The chief evidence that Stone’s father existed is the fact of Stone himself. All other claims – that he was a railroad detective, was a Greek or a Jew, had been killed by a bomb in Shanghai in 1937, even that his given name was Homer – are hearsay, most of them floated by Gladys one day, taken back the next ...”

“... of Consciousness (1991), each character had a particular prose style: the detective sounds like Chandler, the heroine muses in a Woolfian fugue and so on (the veteran translator Michael Henry Heim was in action here). This time, Canongate has reproduced her polyphony of registers by commissioning three translators to work on the different parts of the book ...”

“... the time that but for his speaking he was in appearance like a cross between a fiend and a tallow chandler. Rossetti, whose friendship is the one most rewardingly described, is also best shown at his worst, or most exasperating. He stayed with the Browns while he was working on Found: This morning, Gabriel not yet having done his cart & talking quite freely ...”

“... Revett was joined instead by the artist William Pars and a scholar, the epigraphist Richard Chandler, who had never been abroad. ‘Turned fresh out of Magdalen to a difficult and somewhat fatiguing voyage’, as one Dilettante put it, he nevertheless survived the experience. The published results found their way into the libraries of country houses and ...”

“... the navy and Marine Corps. He was funny too. My wife, Heather, and I were there when his daughter, Chandler, was born in San Diego. I remember as we all anxiously waited to know his or her arrival, John came out with a sheepish grin and said: “Well, she’s a Republican!”’ John Spahr and his wife, Diane, worked hard at their marriage, but in the ...”

“... haberdashers, two woollen-drapers, a leather-seller, salter, bookbinder, grocer, brewer, tallow-chandler and two undescribed. For some hundred and fifty years London juries in politically sensitive cases continued to have a profile like this: they were empanelled from lesser gentry, shopkeepers, master tradesmen, merchants and dealers – a social stratum ...”

“... line). Where Beckett, whose prose fiction deserves more consideration, gets nine lines, and Chandler only dates of birth and death, White gets a page and a half (68 lines) and a humanist fanfare: ‘These and other novels ... are outstanding in their range of social portraiture, psychological penetration, imaginative power, in their deep instinctive ...”

“... him to various other forms of secrecy’. He was to become a government spy when Robert Harley was Lord High Treasurer (effectively Prime Minister) and he uses the word ‘secret’ obsessively in Crusoe (it occurs five times on one page). Novak sees his experience of prison and the survival strategies to which it led as crucial to his ...”