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“... some of his most profound statements on art, society, religion and the creative process. Joseph Frank’s biography calls these years ‘miraculous’ yet the conditions under which Dostoevsky was working were anything but splendid. In the novels, thrilling conversations about ultimate questions typically take place in the most sordid settings, as when Ivan ...”

“... waited for a moment before he inspected the other and then pulled that up too. ‘Have you seen Frank lately?’ he asked. ‘Once or twice since Christmas,’ she said. ‘He has too much parish work to come and visit me very much, and maybe that’s the way it should be. It would be terrible if it was the other way around, if he saw his mother more than ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... de Morgan. Human Voices unmistakably suggests an inwardness with life at the BBC, and Innocence a close familiarity with post-war Italy, Gramsci and various human deformities. Other novels hint at omniscience concerning Cambridge, and Russia in 1913. All this is inside information, which never seems to be got up or stuck in for the occasion, as sometimes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”