“... hero, when a wrecked health service allows a loved friend to die, can only describe the cause of death as ‘the same thing that gets everybody in the end: a combination of circumstances’. Cancer, in this case, plus the undiluted philosophy of the market. This world and this mentality are not gone from Coe’s new novel, The House of Sleep. They are ...”

“... a letter to his mother that fills two notebooks, and which he means her to read after his death. ‘It was such a letter,’ we are informed, ‘as Kafka had addressed to his father.’ Asbury is one in a line of misguided, cartoonishly presented liberals whom the narratives developed in O’Connor’s brilliant but remorseless short stories and ...”

“... to one of many fascinated men, and by doing so precipitates a chain of events which leads to the death of her husband. She makes some money, moves to a smaller house, refuses all offers of help, and reconstructs her identity, to the frustration of her lover, who wants to rescue her himself, and who, ‘when he looked back ... saw ... her standing in a cage ...”

“... austerity disproportionately affects women – gathered outside Holloway Prison to protest the death of Sarah Reed in custody with plumes of green and purple smoke. Sometimes no one listens if you ask nicely. If feminism is condemned to come in waves, with each generation having to relearn what was achieved in the ...”

“... vistas of cloud rolling through cable-thick greenery where strange birds called. ‘Of course,’ Sarah said. And added, almost provocatively, ‘the heart has its reasons’. ‘Is that another allusion?’ She didn’t answer but drew on the cigarette. This was still the time when it was fashionable and mature to smoke, and in such a fashion. The silence ...”

“... points out that his lover Alfred Douglas had a longer run in the Church: from 1911 until his death in 1945, he was an ardent Catholic as well as an Ulster Unionist, an antisemite and an enthusiast for Mussolini.The only English writer to match Huysmans had been kicked out of the Scots College. Frederick Rolfe, who was from a family of Dissenting ...”

“... from the novels, restricted to the work of seven novelists: Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve and Frances Burney. (There are occasional references to other writers, such as Jane Austen.) A segment on, for instance, ‘Daughters’ will discuss daughters and the ...”

“... they stopped at a pub en route, emerged blind-drunk, and crashed the car into a scholartree. Sarah Lubman recently explained in the Washington Post that Chinese students are the victims ‘of an educational system which presents limited – and biased – information about the West’, but my student at least had merely been reading some American ...”

“... to confess during this early phase of the witchhunt. Of her two co-defendants at the beginning, Sarah Good denied everything, Sarah Osborne accused Sarah Good. The self-owned witch Tituba has consequently become, in the ever-swelling literature about the horrors of Salem, the catalyst ...”

“... residence with stags’ heads in the hall. In the dining room there were laptops everywhere. Sarah Harrison, Assange’s personal assistant and girlfriend, was wearing a woolly jumper and kept scraping her ringlets off her face. Another girl, maybe Spanish or South American or Eastern European, came into the drawing room where the fire was blazing. I ...”

“... fit his philosophical and religious beliefs, poetic practice and dissolute life into a whole. His death in 1680 seemed so aptly emblematic of the lack of cohesion in his character that it has claimed undue attention. The most notorious rake of his age spent the last few months of life in discussion of Christian doctrine. A poet who could not have been more ...”

“... and several hundred pages, for the heroine to confront the fact of her mother’s suicide. In Death of a River Guide (1994), on the other hand, the protagonist’s sorrows reflect a more public tragedy. Drowning under a waterfall, Aljaz Cosini – the somewhat dyspeptic narrator – is assailed by fitful visions of his family history, which is also a ...”

“... being played by Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Crawford. (Or, judging from the picture on the cover of Sarah Bakewell’s book, Veronica Lake. Except that it isn’t of Mrs Rudd – a publishing imposture to follow on the heels of so many other impostures in this story.) The supporting characters include a tight-fisted, thin-skinned and ill-tempered admiral (with ...”

“... fancy shapes after dinner’). He was ‘patchily informed about the Old Masters’, according to Sarah Walden, ‘and seems to have taken surprisingly little trouble to familiarise himself with their works or techniques’. Except for a trip to the Netherlands to study Hals, he never joined in pilgrimages to aesthetically hallowed sites, but looked at ...”

“... of this mood in Afrikaans fiction as ‘an intimation of apocalypse, which implies not just the death of the individual or the end of his hopes, but the destruction of the entire known world or way of life’. All the same, it warns: ‘If the outline of a map of contemporary South African writing does seem to emerge, the map should be used ...”