“... narrow focus, in the way that these few poems, produced over many years, should have settled so close by one another, with their themes of break-up and breakdown, their shattered atmosphere, their identical reference points of hands and heads and hair and flowers and grass and snow and shadow. That ‘silence on other subjects’ that Brecht mentioned in a ...”

“... to it, and the energy of illusions. But How I Grew leaves us on the cold hillside. It is, to be frank, more than a little boring, like having tea with an elderly lady who holds you with her glittering eye while going on and on about her misspent youth. Boasting about it, in fact – but in a mumbling sort of way, dense with references to Maddies and Dotties ...”

“... with ‘I may be gone for some time.’ Roth’s titles have often teased with implied offers of frank confession: Reading Myself and Others. The Ghost Writer, ‘My True Story’, etc. In the preface to the last Peter Tarnopol solemnly announced that something truer than true was on its way: ‘Presently Mr Tarnopol is preparing to forsake fiction for a ...”

“... The father manhandled René out of the garden onto the public pavement. The other young man came close behind, more interested in asking questions before committing himself to a brawl, and so did the woman. I took her on one side and gave her the spanner, explaining that we had not been making an unprovoked assault on Kevin. By this time there was a mêlée ...”

“... of the judiciary, both north and south of the Tweed. The judges are attacked for their tendency to close ranks, for their refusal to disbelieve Police evidence at its most suspect and for a determination to maintain a belief in infallibility rather than a faith in justice. Lord Denning’s report on the Profumo case was ‘a disgrace’, full of tittle-tattle ...”

“... sunny day when he was still on the sunny side of 50. His biographer exposes this engagingly frank first sentence as false: we are being nudged towards Brulard’s preferred self-image. Meanwhile, as our passion for unexpurgated details about our heroes intensified, another motive for autobiography emerged: the pre-emptive strike against would-be ...”

“... which may readily be understood. But then there had been other such pangs as my book drew to a close: every few months came a further contribution – not a few of them from the pen of Martin Amis – to a subject which is widely supposed to be exhausted. To suppose it exhausted is not to be unable to suppose that its new works may be pathfinders: the ...”

“... before Christ was crucified. Yeats came to O Rathaille, or to this line of his, with the help of Frank O’Connor. Introducing O’Connor’s name, John Jordan introduces a writer who won a particular fame as a translator of Irish as well as a more widely acknowledged renown as a short-story writer in English. The translator has been of extraordinary ...”

“... from the forgers themselves, are the press barons and their editors: Henry Nannen, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Giles and Charles Douglas-Home. That Trevor-Roper should have ‘taken the bona fides of the editor’ – of Stern – ‘as a datum’ passes belief. Probably he has never read the magazine. However, journalists, excluding proprietors, generally have a ...”

“... is far less important than some have insisted. The Jefferson of the Declaration was, in fact, a close disciple of the Scottish Enlightenment, influenced by Reid, Smith, Hume, and above all by Francis Hutcheson. This conclusion emerges from what is presented as a study of Jefferson’s reading and writing joined to a detailed analysis of the 18th-century ...”

“... Letter C’; it reappears in Chapter Nine, entirely concerned with American poetry and comparing Frank O’Hara with Ed Dorn (not the expected names? No, thank heaven); and in Chapter 11, where three English poets who normally trade in pathos are applauded for at one point departing into anti-pathos – Ted Hughes in Crow, Geoffrey Hill in Mercian Hymns and ...”

“... satellite of the metropolis, redeemed if at all as the birth-place of its other famous son, Frank Sinatra. Kinsey’s family were devoutly Methodist, his father an organiser of the Inter-Church Civic League, an organisation formed to monitor the closing time of saloons. No swearing, drinking, dancing or masturbation. A loner, young Alfred found some ...”

“... simpler to build there. Everyday facilities of shopping and schooling are generally available close by, while jobs are not too far away (since the 1950s more than half of American industry has been sited outside old city centres). All this, say sprawl’s opponents, comes at an unaffordable expense in infrastructure, and destroys land which has vital ...”

“... as artlessness, so this abundance of autobiographical detail can easily be mistaken for frank comprehensiveness. ‘His biographers are saved the search for significance,’ G.D.H. Cole declared: ‘he has it all ready for them.’ Only close reading reveals that Cobbett hardly ever mentioned his mother. Or that ...”

“... with a living writer, and yet another difficulty is introduced when the writer’s work is as close to life as Handke’s is. The line separating fact from fiction often disappears in his books. The blend of fact and fiction is confounding by design, as it was with his fellow countryman, contemporary and sometimes rival, Thomas Bernhard, and as it was ...”