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“... on Biblical narrative, Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels, William Golding’s The Paper Men, Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, and John Updike’s Hugging the Shore. There are also essays on Ring Lardner, on D.H. Lawrence, and on Structuralism, which Lodge as late as 1980 regarded as ‘the most significant intellectual movement of our time’. Such ...”

“... years later, she married a future postmaster; they had three children – Basil and Winifred and Peter. She published a few stories in magazines, and was sneered at by her husband’s relatives. In her sixties she wrote three books which made her famous as an articulate inhabitant of that strange planet, the countryside. The books in the trilogy called Lark ...”

“... else. Two authors are credited: ‘by Robert Katz’ is coupled with, in smaller type, ‘and Peter Berling’. The latter is a German film producer, who, says Katz, ‘cannot be called a Fassbinder person’. This formula is used throughout the book (sometimes reduced to FPs) to designate a groupie. Berling, however, is said to possess impressive ...”

“... who are just beginning life can be seen to be much more grown-up. All the infirmities of age – white whine swilling, importunate bladders, evenings beginning after breakfast – thrust us firmly back into the needs and the atmosphere of being young together. And so Alun (at school it was plain Alan) Weaver and his wife Rhiannon come back to South Wales ...”

“... combing the beach for rare quartz, rose and amethyst grains amid the millions that are black, white, tan and grey, can a poem be released into the dizzy freedom of the ‘rainbow-bird’ of one of her final poems, ‘Sonnet’, ‘flying wherever/it feels like, gay!’ ‘Writing poetry,’ she declares sternly in a lecture drafted in the 1960s but never ...”

“... Nadu. The cathedral of San Thome, rebuilt in 1893, is a large neo-Gothic structure in wedding-cake white not far from the southern end of Chennai’s Marine Beach. I saw his tomb in the crypt beneath it, and the displayed sliver of his bone, and the shard of the spear that killed him. The tomb does not actually contain Thomas’s remains, which have a ...”

“... take confirmation in it from the other books under review. Charles Tomlinson’s Annunciations and Peter Porter’s Possible Worlds share Renaissance Virgins for cover illustrations. Tomlinson’s is Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation, in which the angel has just leapt spectacularly over the balcony, terrifying the cat, to make his declaration to an overcome and ...”

“... Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is a tall story, as elaborate and fantastical as any of the yarns spun by the trickster hero of his last novel Illywhacker. For one thing, it’s a family history, and we’re all of us secretly stunned by the coincidences which have resulted, against the odds, in our existence. And the narrator’s account of his great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins, is, by any standards, a weird one ...”

“... and made him welcome. We all do that, all the colony over.’ It is in pursuit of such myths that Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda set out for the promised land; they learn the realities of life in the colony the hard way. Carey set himself against Dickens more explicitly nine years later, in Jack Maggs (1997), an imaginative reworking of Great ...”

“... of pain worse even than losing a child. ‘She’s my best girlfriend,’ Elvis sobbed on the white steps of Graceland when she was gone: ‘She’s all we lived for.’ Before she met Elvis’s father, she was Gladys Love Smith. Her mother was Octavia Luvenia Mansell, her great-grandmother was a Cherokee, Morning ...”

“... at the famous Albert Hall ‘Wholly Communion’ readings on 11 June 1965. I’d watched the Peter Whitehead video. American poets in those days, with their crisper sense of history and occasion, wore suits and ties. I’d read the free-wheeling interviews in fugitive magazines, such as Arthur and Kit Knight’s The Beat Diary. I’d clocked Corso, along ...”

“... in the Sixties and Seventies, she thinks that rhyming English would have been pointless, and Peter Dale’s rather desperate versions (Penguin, 1978) surely prove the point. To the povre Villon, importuned, resurrected, sanctified in heretical pantheons, Sargent-Bauer is a dependable ally. No dutiful translation like hers can hope to ride with the ...”

“... of the aged Walt Whitman to ‘a great old Angora Tom’. The marvellous old poet, with his soft white hair and snowy silken ruff of beard, would have been delighted by the compliment. Philip Callow’s book is the most imaginative re-creation yet made of the poet’s daily physical being, and the photographs of the poet at all ages, from early manhood and ...”

“... are still major obstacles for those who do not form part of the Bar’s core constituency of white middle-class males. Dominic makes great play of a technique of his father’s which is common to all criminal barristers, who vary their accent depending on who they are speaking to – from mockney when talking to clients in the cell to Little Lord ...”

“... in stocking) by her teenage daughter and her daughter’s chum. The case was the subject of Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures. It is one of the few things Bainbridge had in common with her contemporary Angela Carter, who in the 1980s wrote a screenplay about the murder. An early version of Bainbridge’s novel was turned down by several ...”