“... feeling for his medium. His novels are long not because they are structurally ambitious – they’re not – but because he has no idea how to construct, or to cut.Wyatt marries a young woman called Esther, accepting her suggestion that they tie the knot before they know much about each other. Does he know what he is taking on? Her analyst forbids the ...”

“... Jeffrey Archer. I am rereading the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters and come across this remark by George Lyttelton: ‘Sprinters always try to beat the pistol, therefore are essentially unscrupulous and unreliable.’ 30 August. A commercial for Carte D’Or ice cream I would have been very pleased to have written. A family which includes the aged grandmother ...”

“... were trapped’. ‘I have two minor questions,’ she wrote. As usual, they have to do with my George Washington-handicap. I can’t tell a lie even for art, apparently; it takes an awful effort or a sudden jolt to make me alter facts. Shouldn’t it be a lobster town, and further on – where the bait, fish for bait, was trapped – (this is trivial, I ...”