“... them, it could mind them.’Feeney balances this material against evasion and omission – the John McGahern and Anne Enright school of hiding trauma in narrative cracks. As You Were is haunted by the abuses of women in recent Irish history. Between 1925 and 1961 a maternity home for unmarried mothers and their children operated in Tuam, a large town in ...”

“... are born. Are we really free? Or is free-will and responsibility an illusion? In July 1978, Louise Brown precipitated and focused some of these concerns. She was born after an entirely normal pregnancy, but from a conception that took place in a laboratory dish. Moral or not? Legal or not? Playing God? Her existence was made possible by the work of Patrick ...”

“... and Pig Bodine (where the effect is slangy, jivey, cartoonish); at the other end of the scale, John Braine offers us Tom Metfield, Jack Royston, Jane Framsby (can these people really exist, in our minds or anywhere else, with such leadenly humdrum, such dead names?). Saul Bellow’s inventions are Dickensian in their resonance and relish. But they also ...”

“... know nothing about), we sold out to a property millionaire and I accepted an offer to join Curtis Brown, the agents. Small publishing is a risky undertaking at best. I remember John Lehmann’s warning: ‘You sit there listening to the rats under the floorboards.’ As a sailor, I would prefer to say that storm cones were ...”

“... and intellectual pre-eminence. By the end of the 19th century the physiologist Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard was injecting himself with extracts of dog and guinea-pig testicles to restore his youth. (It failed.) In popular culture the scientist’s elixir was transformed into ‘monkey glands’, which had a long, if much satirised, vogue, still extant in ...”

“... to Rumer Godden, with whom she shares a lean style and lack of pretension, and a reader at Curtis Brown, where she was said to have read more manuscripts than anyone else in London – tottering piles on her desk, to which she would respond with notes on neat pink slips, sometimes just one word long: ‘No!’ Her nickname among colleagues was ...”

“... However, nothing is for ever in politics: and were the Communist-nationalist grouping (the ‘Red-Brown alliance’) in evidence in the recently-held Congress to produce a really talented and charismatic individual, then they might have a second chance. (Communists are overtly in power in Uzbekistan, the poorest of the poor former Soviet Central Asian ...”

“... regret and nostalgia, as lithe. A slender, rather girlish woman in her mid-twenties, she had light brown hair and amused, searching eyes, but it was her voice I liked best, a sweet, slightly singing voice that, without a hint of affectation, could reduce me to helpless craving whenever she decided to ‘talk dirty’ (which she did, from time to time, enjoying ...”

“... given a key and took my own bag upstairs. The room was a cramped, overfurnished space with thin brown walls. On the desk was an envelope of conference materials including a laminated pass on a lanyard and a printed programme. It was at that point that I realised I had been enticed to attend the event under a misleading prospectus. The first talk on the ...”

“... he lay in his hidden cove, an innocent sunbather. The morning’s heat had made him even more nut brown and tanned. Here he lay on I, island off an island off an island, with his adventure in the past tense and all safely hidden away. No one knew anything of any of this, except perhaps Señor and except perhaps – though he doubted it – Mr Duke with his ...”

“... how Stephen Dedalus, disowning his own parent, searches for another father. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy (1923) Just as Oscar Wilde began to become himself the year after his father’s death, when he was 21, and John Butler Yeats managed, figuratively, to kill his son by going into exile in ...”

“... very soon, I lose the markers by which I have navigated, the beacons by which I know myself. Like John Clare leaving the tight circle of experience around the village of Helpston (then in Northamptonshire), I step out of my knowledge, to the tottering edge of an abyss known as ‘the future’ or ‘the human contract’. Mortality. Of place and ...”

“... This idea of Wolfenden as a wash-out and the squanderer of a prodigious talent persuaded John Carey, one of his Oxford contemporaries, to find him ‘the least interesting’ of Faulks’s subjects. Not only does Carey challenge Faulks’s claim that ‘in some minor way he represented a generation’: he suggests he was ‘bizarrely ...”

“... Henry VII’s long-lost palaces stood at Richmond and Greenwich, and at Burbage in Wiltshire, John Seymour was starting work on his expensive new house, Wolfhall. Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, like the musical Six and innumerable historical novels and films before and since, owes its popularity to the fact that ‘Tudors and Stuarts’ is still for many ...”

“... to give them the credit of motive that the 27-year-old Cline gives her fictionalised renditions. John Waters dedicated Pink Flamingos to the Manson girls, lampooning the nation’s celebrity obsession with them. In Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s novel about the aftermath of the 1960s, Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello asks his girlfriend if she’ll wear a wig ...”