“... tyrant posing for writers as frequently as Napoleon sat for painters: all laurels and a branch of green olive. Per festeggiare il suvenire d’un grand uomo, as Beethoven wrote – but then he erased it. This pièce de resistance (not by Beethoven precisely) is called ‘My Twenty Hours with Graham Greene in Havana’. In it Garcia Marquez gleefully tells us ...”

“... home is one of the places they are least interested in – but this needn’t be a tragedy. Henry James saw Stevenson as ‘the writer who has most cherished the idea of a certain free exposure’, adding that, ‘to his view the normal child is the child who absents himself from the family circle.’ Stevenson’s most valued version of the normal is ...”

“... Stead seems to have been misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of D.T. Max’s post-mortem profile of Wallace for the New Yorker, and is very much the version of his life as seen from Times Square. ‘Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s’ is Max’s first sentence. It’s a funny ...”

“... still road-dazed and masato-dizzy, to a stall of native crafts: bracelets, necklaces, bright green miniature parrots. Farne opted for a bracelet made from coffee beans. I chose a parrot whistle. Later we were told that these goods were mass-produced elsewhere and delivered to all the settlements. Now Lucho’s companion, Beliza, travelling with her ...”

“... in the 1790s to seize Haiti were eventually sent packing by malaria and yellow fever, and General Henry Clinton’s ‘southern strategy’ in the War of American Independence met with disaster: two-thirds of the British forces in the Carolinas were laid low by the ‘fevers and agues’ – malaria and yellow fever in particular – transmitted by ...”

“... to be tested. Even before Allende had taken the oath of office in 1970, death squads paid for by Henry Kissinger had embarked on a campaign of murder and destabilisation, and had shot down the chief of the Chilean General Staff, René Schneider, in the street, for nothing more than his legalistic opposition to a coup. There was an initial revulsion at ...”

“... a fiction designed to mask a satire on what it was like to be a courtier in the later reign of Henry VIII – an experience which, for want of a better term, could be described as ‘grim’?This is an extreme version of a problem that arises with many ‘folk’ tales, and indeed with many stories which present themselves as anonymously authored, or which ...”

“... are heavy-handed (he wrote under the pseudonym Gabriel Fielding, since he was distantly related to Henry Fielding), is an unnecessary ‘and the horse you came in on’ tacked onto the ‘fuck you’ of the earlier part of the letter. Spark never kissed and made up with the Barnsleys.She was a professional in all things, including falling out. In her early ...”

“... an evocative jacket illustration. Pink clouds portending passion and doom mass over a pleasantly green West Riding landscape, while a man and a woman, with their backs turned, contemplate the view over a workmanlike stretch of dry-stonewalling. It seems fair enough to take the dry-stonewalling as a complimentary metaphor for John Braine’s craft. The Two of ...”

“... the films. In which case, why do they say ‘lovely’ and pass by? Why do they not cry out that Henry James is much more? Even that there is distress, irony, doubt and mystery in the voice of E.M. Forster that these films miss? Thomson’s anti-middlebrow fervour also seems to me to come into play in the contrast between his distaste for John Ford and his ...”

“... her sunk eyes a stagnant tearStole forth, unsettled by the shock;But oft the woods renewed their green,Ere the tired head of Scotland’s QueenReposed upon the block!Even poor Swinburne had a try. His ‘Adieux à Marie Stuart’ is not as bad as Brodsky’s poem, but it definitely comes second:But surely though it die or live,    Your face was worthAll ...”

“... eyes, grey-blue legs and feet. Most of him is black, except the base of the enormous bill is green and yellow and he has a bright gold bib and bunches of red feathers on his stomach and under his tail.’ Lota owned the apartment in Rio and, as Bishop wrote to a friend from Petropolis, forty or fifty miles from Rio, ‘lots of land here and is in the ...”

“... the book is constructed in a series of emotional confrontations, the chapters being given (as in Henry James’s ‘dramatic’ novel, The Awkward Age) the names of the leading actors in each, and the ‘awkward age’ being in this case nearer 67 than 17. The plot concerns retirement and homecoming, ending and reconciliation, and the Welsh setting as Amis ...”

“... 1910 and located two-thirds of the way between Brondesbury and Kilburn Station and Willesden Green Station on the Metropolitan Line. This was one of several neighbourhoods in North-West London to which prospering Jews tended to migrate from East London in the 1920s and 1930s, the most notorious being Golders ...”

“... of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the monumental ruggedness of his face, its deep furrows like plough marks crossing a field’. Probably the most beautiful and attentive drawing had been done five years earlier by ...”