“... pondered this question the career of Jacques Doriot has always had a special fascination. Now Jean-Paul Brunet has ransacked just about everything – including police files – in order to put the full story together. He has an amazing story to tell. Doriot was the only child of a working-class family, his father a blacksmith forced into factory work and a ...”

“... it was uttered, and so never reach the person called.’ Or: ‘The lady’s smoothly shaved legs lay side by side like two similarly clad sisters, both in silk sheaths.’ Or: the waiters ‘moved about like gardeners; when they poured coffee and milk into the cups, it was as if they were watering white flower-beds. Trees and kiosks stood on the ...”

“... Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids this week.’ ‘To ...”

“... from the Surrealists, especially since this novel takes place in a Paris that is decidedly Paul Eluard’s capitale de la douleur. And, at this stage, Stead is omnivorously assimilating influences from every conceivable source. She is also a self-consciously brilliant young writer. The Beauties and Furies is evidence of a love-affair with language ...”

“... possess nothing more than a veneer of civilisation – one has only to scratch them to lay bare the wolf-skin underneath,’ and the best solution would be a universal bloodbath, after which the oppressors will find it is a bit late to be sorry ‘they left the hordes in that state of ignorance and savagery they enjoy today.’ Sardism gave way to ...”

“... a call back to nature, and a subway ticket to modernity.’The origins of the New Negro Movement lay further back, in the widespread social and cultural upheaval in America at the beginning of the century. It was a ‘time of great transition,’ according to Wayne Cooper, Claude McKay’s biographer, when ‘old, fundamental assumptions that had dominated ...”

“... from London in my hands, I spent a long time pondering the implications. For almost fifteen years Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were ...”

“... arrange a review. ‘These were not actions which carried any particular risk, but the real risk lay in the greater possibility of a serious outcome if he did not do these things.’ Taking all factors into account, it continued, the consultant’s ‘omissions … essentially amounted to gross negligence’ and misconduct.The​ tribunal next had to decide ...”

“... AS A MATTER OF COURSE? I do: simply DISGUSTING. It makes me ANGRY. Everything about the ree-lay-shun-ship between men and women makes me angry. It’s all a fucking balls-up. It might have been planned by the army or the Ministry of Food.To be fair, Larkin’s foreplay could be on the funereal side. In the middle of one date with Ruth, Larkin ...”

“... firm foundation to the current idea of Central Europe, the future might do so, for here surely lay the Achilles heel of the Soviet Empire. In this sense, the definition of Central Europe was political: it designated the frontline against Communism, wherever that might be; Garton Ash even cites a friend’s opinion that we might now say George Orwell was a ...”

“... us Walter Benjamin’s image of the writer’s bed as ‘the summit of a scaffold on which Proust lay flat, holding his manuscript above him, his face pressed against the upper reaches of his imagination’. Proust’s father, a doctor, was a fresh-air fiend; there is probably another book to be written about how the sick and quasi-sick relate to their ...”

“... him, but he ‘moved steadily on, his face set towards the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping’. In her teens, as well as reading Poe, O’Connor spent much time toiling over linoleum-block cartoons, and it was as a cartoonist that she made a name for herself at Georgia State College for Women, where she was art editor of the school ...”

“... correction of ‘many manifest errors’ was important, the editors say, but ‘the greater task lay in the restoration through emendation of the syntactical coherence of individual sentences as they underwent periodic amplification under the writer’s revising hand.’ And again: ‘Overwhelmingly, the changes pertain to the syntax (the flow of the ...”

“... diamonds and pearls. Confident that my every word would be welcome, if not infinitely precious, I lay in my hospital bed with a happily expectant air. It’s hard not to see Updike’s tremendous output – more than sixty books over five decades – as the fulfilment of a filial quest. Linda had a bad temper, and administered ‘stinging ...”

“... the four Hoke Moseley books he wrote in the 1980s, has just been announced in the US; it will star Paul Giamatti, the shlub from Sideways. It’s really good casting. Willeford is adored by his peers and big-deal crime writers like Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block praise his work. ‘Nobody,’ Elmore Leonard said, ‘writes a better crime novel than Charles ...”