“... you to undertake more than you can do ... Moreover, to frequent newspaper offices, to live always close to the deafening cataract of books, is chilling to literary endeavour.’ Lord David Cecil, in his affectionate memoir, mentions that his father-in-law disliked the business of writing but thinks he was lucky in the end, since short pieces were in fact what ...”

“... to their world, not to the Gorbals. The mere facts are indestructibly interesting: what comes close to spoiling them is laboured hindsight, expressed in unpersuasively heavy-handed prose. A pity; but what makes autobiographies ‘worth it’ is good writing. Underneath the thick paint there is a document of some historical value, but the technique that ...”

“... admitted later, a certain envy of aristocrats, regarding them perhaps as a class tantalisingly close to her own, though separated by a barrier of hedonism impenetrable by members of such a family as the Stephens: aristocrats ‘believe enormously in leading a happy luxurous life... They shut their eyes and suck down their sugar plums.’ The other side of ...”

“... of them, introduced according to voice pitch and inside leg measurement, is given the novelist’s close attention. On an unwisely permitted spree in the vacant hours before a choral competition, they ravage the shops, pubs and clubs of Edinburgh. Their language is colloquial Scots, though that of the narrator remains free and inventive: ‘A few cassandras of ...”

“... roles to his family. Avowedly happier with the lives of others than with his own, he remains as close as the circumstance permits to the condition of invisible watcher. Biography, he says, had formerly provided an ‘exit from myself’, and here he is, still, as far as is consistent with the product being autobiography, ‘stepping from my own life into ...”

“... to be one kind of storyteller, and turns out to be quite another; casual sexual partners Tommy and Frank, friends who meet for dreamy, almost absent-minded chemsex; employer and employee, Ronnie the plumber and his mate Pigeon, whom Ronnie accidentally leaves behind at the end of a workday and who hides for days in the attic of a client’s house.We have ...”

“... in his treatment of Donne in these Clark Lectures; there are a few, but too few, instances of close literary criticism, nose to text, brisk, dogmatic, arguable and fun. Nevertheless, he insists that the lectures are works of literary criticism, not meant to be anything else, and certainly not professing scholarship; but of course he cannot draw the line ...”

“... had to work shifts to prevent the harbour gates freezing. ‘You’ll not go down there,’ Frank Elwiss threatened his wife, and she laughed delightedly as she cleared the dinner things, banging the pots down into the sink and pushing him out of her way. ‘It’s dangerous, Cath, you hear me!’ He was on afternoons, and due to go on duty for two ...”

“... embark on a crime spree through greater Detroit and live high on the hog until a job goes wrong. Frank J. Ryan is a used-car salesman. Ernest Stickley is a petty criminal. They meet (or, more precisely, meet cute) when Stick tries to swipe a Camaro off Frank’s lot. A week later, ...”

“... Jack Clark and Rodney Philips, who were interested in poetry: they ‘were in some disbelief that close to the Clark family house could actually reside a contributor to New Writing, as, in a way that now seems baffling, had been reported to them’. That sentence, with its contrived inversions, has a very characteristic stagger – Neil Powell prefers to talk ...”

“... in which narrative voices weave in and out of one another, but a clear alternation of viewpoints. Frank Harland opens with a remarkably beautiful and, as it were, densely textured evocation of a motherless childhood in Killarney, many miles south-west of Brisbane in ‘lush country... of the green, subtropical kind’. Phil Vernon comes in next with an ...”

“... Brooker gives special prominence to critics like Conrad Aiken and Ezra Pound who had been close to Eliot from the first. Aiken never sounds quite happy about what his famous friend is doing, and Pound bangs on about his absurd religion and his failure to understand economics as he, Pound, did. Yet on the whole the second curve shows a growing tendency ...”

“... twin Jesus and the younger Christ. Their relationship as described in infancy and childhood is not close. Christ is sickly, a secret favourite of his mother, credibly odious. Jesus is a healthy, simple, good character who gets into scrapes from which Christ acquires merit by trying to rescue him. Embarked on his mission, Jesus preaches simple goodness and ...”

“... and the door in                             another direction is as close to Eliot, though unparodically, as ‘Chard Whitlow’. So, in another mode, is this, from one of Reed’s dramatic monologues, ‘Philoctetes’: The noiseless chant has begun in the heart of the ...”

“... the concept of generation was sufficiently differentiated from that of class, yet sufficiently close to it, for the generation of 1914 to have, as a generation, ‘a project of hegemony over other social classes’. Not, of course, in England. What really set the generation of 1914 apart from all others was simply that it lived before, during and after the ...”