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“... cover (a photo of a little boy), a bestseller a second time over. ‘Morante’s subject​ ,’ Tim Parks wrote in PN Review in the 1980s, ‘is the fairly common one of the child, every child, who grows up, grows away from the beauties and innocence of infancy to the complications and very often horrors of adult life, of consciousness, of ...”

“... into novels – Penelope Fitzgerald, Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Beryl Bainbridge, William Trevor, Tim Parks among others – to limber up. Then she rolled up her sleeves and having extracted the technical nuts and bolts (beginning, middle, end; main and subsidiary plot and characters), wrote Naim Attallah’s novel in six ...”

“... as you please.’Stead’s ability to copy mannerisms and sound is in full view in Letty Fox, as Tim Parks notes in his introduction. The book is a long satirical account of the life of a young woman in 1940s Manhattan, drawn from the world Stead knew through Blake and the years she spent living with him on 14th Street. We know exactly where we are as ...”

“... Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and thrust his hairy rump into his partner’s face, demanding that she kiss it, which she did. In Roger’s Version the roles are reversed. Now it is a young woman – Verna Ekelof – who exposes herself ...”

“... it, doesn’t it have renewed plausibility, notably in the case of politicians who combine, as Tim Parks recently put it in the New York Review of Books, ‘a skilful use of rhetoric with a tendency to bully and then to seek approval for having bullied in a positive way’? Buses ferried thousands of scribes up from Edinburgh and Glasgow to a tented ...”

“... of indeterminacy of many younger people, their rejection of fixity and concerns with fluidity. Tim Parks, a translator as well as a writer of fiction, says in The Novel: A Survival Skill that ‘we involve ourselves in ongoing relationships with writers and position ourselves in relation to them and the kind of stories they tell, much as we position ...”

“... as he chose to do when he created Wizard of the Crow in Gikuyu before rewriting it in English. Tim Parks has vehemently attacked global literature as a monstrous birth of publishing corporatism, as writers in the world beyond the Anglosphere keep a weather eye on translatability into the huge English reading market: ‘At the moment we are passing ...”

“... from a politically-aware National Trust – not a bad model, perhaps, in a nation of theme parks and garden ...”

“... the racks. As one B&N publicity statement put it (intending self-praise), these were ‘amusement parks for the mind’. Sad people would virtually live there, phantoms of the bookshop. There were in-store play areas for children, while their parents shopped for the books that would give their offspring a head-start in life. The relaxed mood camouflaged ...”

“... lost nor distant – it also says we are not to cry for her, a line I thought had been written by Tim Rice. A newish monument to Evita has on it a sentence taken from a novel by Tomás Eloy Martínez, supposedly her first words on meeting Perón: ‘Colonel, thank you for existing.’ When Eloy Martínez pointed out that the phrase was not historical, that he ...”

“... very little of them. He notes the use of ritual disguises and blackened faces in attacks on deer-parks in the Kentish Weald during Henry VIII’s reign, but offers no comment on this manifestation of a phenomenon whose 18th-century form is familiar from the pages of E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters. In the course of an interesting account of some ...”

“... anyhow, and it might be risky to pry: what is at best a ‘benign literary parasitism’, to quote Tim Parks, could ruin a good novel or poem for ever. It’s not just a question of revelation, of sordid details. I never thought about the reasons I didn’t read biographies, I just didn’t, and now I see that I distrusted them (and still do), that I ...”

“... previously best known for comedy roles – the father in Malcolm in the Middle and the dentist Tim Whatley in Seinfeld. Walter White is, for Cranston, a great mid-life unfolding of talent meeting opportunity: the challenge of a part within a part, an actor playing a man who is constantly forced to be an actor in order to preserve what he has, up to and ...”

“... not include ‘specific scheduled commitments’ by the developing countries. This did not stop Tim Wirth, the US Under-Secretary of State for Global Affairs, announcing at a preparatory conference in Geneva: ‘Let me make clear the US view – the science calls on us to take urgent action.’ Yet, in 1993, early in his Presidency, Clinton had already ...”

“... This would normally take twenty minutes or so, but Spahr’s were famous for their length. Major Tim Golden remembers ‘a debriefing of John’s that took six hours. Nobody could believe it. The poor guy was in there for six hours and John would just go over everything in detail.’ I met Major Tim ‘Nugs’ Golden and ...”