“... 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 ...”

“... lasagna behind them. The same happens all over the planet. Call it the Rapture or the Rip-Off: Stephen King had done the disappearing passenger thing in ‘The Langoliers’ in 1990. But why should the devil have all the good stories? Left Behind sets up the narrative framework for the subsequent volumes. Rayford Steele, the pilot of the enraptured ...”

“... a Fourth Estate. No one has demonstrated convincingly that such a thing ever really existed, and Stephen Koss, in his two-volume study of the political press in Britain, argued authoritatively that if it ever did, it didn’t last long. Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe), who by 1896 owned both the Evening News and the Daily Mail, said: ‘I see my ...”

“... found her ‘quite furious’ when he visited. Ann Yearsley, the poetry-writing wife of a failed small-time farmer, and the mother of six children, had been scraping an existence by various means, including collecting scraps of food from the gentry houses where she sold milk. One of those houses was the Bristol school run by Hannah More’s older sisters, a ...”

“... the midst of this whirlwind that London and Washington began secret negotiations over strategic ‘small island base complexes’ in the Indian Ocean. In particular, Pentagon planners had their eyes on the Chagossian island of Diego Garcia, a U-shaped volcanic atoll with a deep crystalline lagoon at the centre, which could be turned into a haven for warships ...”

“... thus I too work with you in the overthrow of Society.” To which he replied: “The weapon is too small to be of any value.” ’ Ashbee’s experiments, from the workshops of the Guild of Handicraft to town-planning in Jerusalem, showed, as no theoretical writing of his or anyone else’s could, the limits of what ‘romantic socialism’ could ...”

“... your beautiful saintly soul.’ Eliot was a creature of habit: in the mornings, communion at St Stephen’s; in the afternoons, business at Faber, dictating innumerable letters; writing in the evenings; rosaries in the early hours. Letters to Emily, typed from his desk, were a vital part of his amatory and auditory imagination – part of the rhythm of his ...”

“... since it’s an authorship made up of two people, the challenge is to discover how, like Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, they might ever be brought together at all.) In 2000, DeWitt published a first novel called The Last Samurai; it sold a hundred thousand copies in English, was translated into ten languages and turns up on various ...”

“... exception of two lucid studies of its foundation, Robert Hildebrand’s Dumbarton Oaks (1990) and Stephen Schlesinger’s Act of Creation (2003), each the work of a serious diplomatic historian, little or nothing of analytic interest exists about the organisation, which has proved an intellectual sink-hole, down which swirl the drearily self-serving memoirs ...”

“... or Eliot into verse drama and High Anglicanism. Bunting’s Complete Poems are a tantalisingly small and pure uchronia, and as for his life, his model in these things was Walter Raleigh. A Life of Bunting, then, was for many years the most obviously ‘missing’ book I could think of. For all the reasons – the ticked boxes – above; for a rather ...”

“... to them … & a nose with a lump in the middle, & a square jaw and a nameless complexion with small ears almost round & an ordinary neat figure & next to no legs. Is there anything in the outside? Well come in, what is there here? A quick heart that beats for the children. A longing to understand – a great overwhelming ignorance – a sympathy for all ...”

“... Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), plus a storybook for children. Most of her work centres on women in small-scale, domestic settings: Self-Help starts out in the Manhattan everybody dreams about, but later stories unfold in the sort of unglamorous, family-friendly Midwestern suburbs she would have got to know after taking up a post at the University of ...”