“... bank of benches at one side of the space, it turned out that these figures were not as dead as the young male corpse in black, set apart from the others, might have feared or hoped. Selectively revived in turns by a sort of black mass (performed by a coven of witches evidently visiting from Dunsinane), the cast of Hamlet were compelled once more to enact the ...”

“... annexe at Christchurch Priory in Dorset nonetheless represents Marston as a bearded and beruffed young man sitting with a balder companion in front of two tankards of ale. Sadly, today’s visual shorthand for ‘morally intense Jacobean playwright who took holy orders’, even in the church where he prayed for a quarter of a century, is just ‘bloke in pub ...”

“... by John Ashbery as ‘Sideshow’. The poem describes a set of frightening ‘robust rascals’, young and old, who appear to be street performers.They act out ballads, tragedies of thieves and demi-gods … and resort to magnetic comedy. Their eyes flame, the blood sings, the bones swell, tears and trickles of red descend. Their raillery or their terror ...”

“... There’s​ a morbid aspect to Libertyville, the Chicago suburb where Pan, Michael Clune’s first novel, is set: ‘At night in the Midwest in winter,’ we are told, ‘the raw death of the endless future … is sometimes bare inches above the roofs.’ It’s the kind of thought that could only occur to a sullen teenager with a flair for melodrama ...”

“... Then there were the monumental bronzes: the Madonna and Child in Cavendish Square and the St Michael at Coventry, for example. These were well-liked by most people and liked very much indeed by many. Because they are whole figures, not just heads, you can see how Epstein handled poses: they tend to be solemn, formal and frontal, the palms of the hands ...”

“... fell in love with their leading actresses, wrote their major works in six years and died young. More important, they both wrote plays about the impact on the present of the future; Ibsen’s great subject was the impact on the present of the past. In Chekhov’s first great play, The Seagull, the first three acts adumbrate hopes and ambitions that ...”

“... evoked by these evasions – which leaks through their words and their scarce silences. When the young hero of Haroun and the Sea of Stories discovers that silence, too, has ‘its own grace and beauty’, the effect is one of major shock. He had thought that silence was evil, and the rest of the story he is in points that way. The arch-enemy is the Prince ...”

“... 1952, at a meeting of the Shaw Society, he publicly relinquished work on the bibliography – and young Dan Laurence, then a college graduate assistant, stood up and announced that he would undertake the job. Thirty-one years and 15 days later it was published. Mr Laurence has been sustained over these decades, he tells us, by ‘angry determination’. What ...”

“... task should be so ridiculously easy: ‘One had to forget ... that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart.’ Killing is simple and hard in Nabokov: child’s play and yet ...”

“... from the blow, riddled with ambivalence as he must have been. He was helped in his recovery by a young French admirer, Françoise Laffitte-Cyon. But here, too, ironies abound. With Françoise’s help, Ellis began to come to terms with the fact that his own sexual focus did not concentrate on the act itself, but somewhere else. In some startling private ...”

“... of contents (Solie has wonderful titles: ‘Your News Hour Is Now Two Hours’ or ‘Cardio Room, Young Women’s Christian Association’ or ‘Your Premiums Will Never Increase’. As good as anything by Eno). I am floundering. The only reservation I have about the book is that it leaves out a number of other, equally marvellous poems. Perhaps that’s ...”

“... film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved ...”

“... alternatives. This third story is called ‘Pauline de S.’, and opens the collection. A young man learns that an old friend is dying, and pays her a visit. He prepares himself by imagining how she must be feeling – no, how she should be feeling – and gets things hopelessly wrong. Surely the proximity of death inverts all our ...”

“... that wounds you, bores you or carries you away.’ In this language we may hear something of the young girl’s father, disobeyed in the letter but followed in the spirit. Who could resist the destructive and the demonic? Though I’m not sure about the clinging.Kristeva likes apparent contradictions, though hers aren’t as unruly as those we find in ...”

“... the mind inside the narrative voice might also be that of our hero, Frédéric Moreau, a depressed young man on his way ...”