“... of Fiction (1921). Having studied this ultra-Jamesian tract, the bright young Gerald Mills and John Boon determined that ‘viewpoint’ was the main ingredient in narrative and that their romances ‘should always be written from the heroine’s point of view, in order to promote identification and increase interest and suspense’. The ...”

“... a problem as Heaney’s family grew and grew up. To one of his touchiest correspondents, the poet John Montague, he confessed in 1976: ‘I’m in a furious mess over the housing question. This place is a hellhole because of lack of space … The launderette in Wicklow has closed down, so Marie washes for four of us and herself in the bath.’ The life of the ...”

“... is talking about herself, her predicament and anguish. At the crucifixion Mary Magdalen sobbed; John, the beloved disciple, stood ‘with face like stone’. ‘Nobody looked into the silent mother’s eyes, nobody dared.’ ‘Crucifixion’ comes just before the Epilogue, written in March 1940, in which the hours and the people outside the prison are ...”

“... bears out pretty well the sense implicit in her lightning sketch. Richard Perceval is the son of John, Robert’s youngest brother, who was also snubbed, patronised and cold-shouldered. Richard Perceval has written excellent studies, admirably researched, of A.E. Housman and of the Powys brothers, but now is the time to strike a blow for father and get ...”

“... Maclean and the ‘fifth man’ (‘revealed’ with too much fanfare by Andrew/Gordievsky), John Cairncross. These men, and others, performed prodigies of courage and treachery, yet their work was more often than not ignored, misinterpreted or brutally cut short. Sorge’s warnings were ignored by Stalin, clinging to his belief in Hitler’s word. Maly ...”

“... for the US Senate; wrote 17 more novels; lived to memorialise (in essays in this book) his friends John Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Italo Calvino, Orson Welles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anaïs Nin ... In this kind of summary Vidal’s life sounds almost comically glamorous and eventful. One of the secrets of his social and professional success lies in the ...”

“... shrewd enough to see the possibilities in a life of Savage when he put the matter to his publisher John Roberts in 1744, a year after his friend’s death. Everyone who heard about the dead poet at once became interested in him. Sir Joshua Reynolds remembered how he had found a copy of Johnson’s book, when it first came out, on a friend’s mantelpiece, and ...”

“... certainly be important to future historians. In the preface to the decennial volume for 1971-80, John Lennon was singled out, along with Benjamin Britten, as One of the two most distinguished new entrants from the field of music, but it remains true that there has been very little attempt to memorialise popular musicians who during their lives were household ...”

“... communicated influences? Bohm and Hiley point to recent experiments inspired by the late John Bell. Particles generated in pairs can move apart while maintaining a mysterious connectedness. Observing the state of one, an experimenter can be sure that its distant partner is in a correlated state, in much the same way as examining one half of a fish ...”

“... on it (yet perhaps is also, in another aspect, identical with it, as in the essay here by John Middleton on the Lugbara). What results is a well-tempered cosmos within the larger ‘wild’ reality. At the material level, a biological temporality characterised by generation and decay prevails. In contrast, the formal order is a stationary dance in ...”

“... or applied in the wrong combinations, and have always been threatened, as the English Liberal John Morley succinctly observed, by the fact that ‘the Irish are more provoked by the extension of force than they are gratified by the extension of justice.’ Townshend concludes: ‘history may suggest that certain realities lie outside the scope of ...”

“... it’s the old story in nice new Faber covers. In essence, Peters aims to do for the life what John Carey did for the works with his applauded Thackeray, Prodigal Genius (1977): that is to say: re-tread familiar ground with brisk, commonsensical illumination. This she does well. Thackeray’s Universe is attractively written and profits the reader with a ...”

“... it helps the would-be novelist to know from the inside, as it were, what his people are up to. As John Francis more elegantly puts it in his Introduction, ‘you feel Pym knew more about her characters than is necessary for us to know, but that these reserves are expended only if essential for her art.’ As Johnson observed to Boswell, you cannot know a ...”

“... own affair. ‘The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society,’ John Stuart Mill said, ‘is that which concerns others.’ What was done in secret was another matter. Secret ballots were pernicious, according to Mill, because they freed voters from ‘all sense of shame or responsibility’. ‘Everything secret,’ Lord ...”

“... sick of being a person – Christopher Isherwood, or Isherwood, or even Chris,’ he had told John Lehmann a few years earlier. In America, both Auden and Isherwood would outgrow the need for ‘boys’. Between purging bouts of transcendentalism, Isherwood drank too much (although he was never, Parker insists, alcoholic) and did not succeed – beyond ...”