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“... the dust-heap the remains of the Christmas pudding (‘idolatrous confectionery’) offered to young Edmund by the servants. The equivalent moment in The Recognitions hardly measures up: a guest invited for Wyatt’s fourth birthday brings a plus one, so under pressure from Aunt May (who has apparently baked an exact number of slices) Wyatt must sacrifice ...”

“... is grasped for its incremental and associational significance. It is a place of synecdoche, in Stephen Bann’s sense, where the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts and where value is distinctly not of the tradeable kind. If the continuities of ancestral residence were to be broken, then the associational magic would die. If an object were to ...”

“... By the time of the libels, most of her older siblings had left home. Only two brothers, Stephen and Ernest, both of them labourers but often unemployed, remained. Edith’s mother is described by Hilliard as ‘quiet and unobtrusive’ whereas her father was irritable and quick to meddle in the affairs of others. At the time of the libels, Edith was ...”

“... up to £395,000), this is a tremendous example of aspiration coming to fruition,’ says Stephen Oakes, area director for English Partnerships. Inch by inch, the working canal between Limehouse Basin and the Islington tunnel has become a ladder of glass, connecting Docklands with the northern reaches of the City. Footballers, with loose change to ...”

“... explains that he first met Day Lewis at Harvard during the academic year 1964-65, when he was a young apprentice academic and Lewis was the visiting Charles Eliot Norton Professor: the differences in age and culture and experience somehow worked to kindle the regard and friendship we instantly felt for each other and found in each other. I was beginning to ...”

“... in his fiction that has attracted criticism from other South African writers, such as Gordimer and Stephen Watson. Watson has objected that Coetzee’s concern with textuality means that his work is ‘little more than an artfully constructed void’, while Gordimer has identified as a weakness what she calls his ‘revulsion against all political and ...”

“... inside flap of the jacket, the publishers were giving away too many clues. The drawing showed the young man whom Mr Pennington describes in his Introduction as having the ‘slight irregularity of face that women find handsome, especially when matched with blond hair and blue eyes’. The photograph of Mr Pennington revealed a dark-bearded, middle-aged man ...”

“... when I asked him which of the other artforms novel-writing was most like.) Lennon captures the young Mailer drinking gin to be more like Hemingway. He sees him smarting at his father’s addiction to gambling and shadow-boxing around Brooklyn impersonating Rocky Graziano. He doesn’t quite explain Mailer’s pugilistic kind of heroism, but he portrays ...”

“... was left for us to do.’ The Chicago poet and editor Paul Carroll, born in 1926, wrote: To a young poet the scene in American verse in the late 1940s and early 1950s seemed much like walking down 59th Street in New York for the first time. Elegant and sturdy hotels and apartment buildings stand in the enveloping dusk, mysterious in their ...”

“... Mrs de Quincey withdrew Thomas from the school. The reasons for this are obscure, although Leslie Stephen, in his entry for the Dictionary of National Biography, stresses that she felt Thomas had become ‘vain’ in his learning. It was clearly a damaging thing to do, and may have contributed to de Quincey’s opting, in his mature prose style, for the ...”

“... Cantor, George Burns, George Jessel and Sophie Tucker, but the future movie mogul Harry Cohn, the young Walter Winchell and his own older brother. Signed by the Shubert Brothers in 1911, Jolson was the first product of the bastard forms of vaudeville and minstrel show to be legitimised on Broadway’s Great White Way, where he addressed his audience with an ...”

“... making people throb with awakenedness.‘Instead of the philosophy being the clue to Lawrence,’ Stephen Potter wrote in 1930, ‘it will be Lawrence who is the clue to the philosophy.’ Almost a century later, Wilson takes a similar tack, although she is clearly not much taken with the philosophy in its own right: ‘For all his claims to prophetic ...”

“... waists’. Perhaps in that moment, or more likely in this much later one, Margot identified that young woman, shrinking under the conquering gaze of Sir Leslie, as a younger version of herself, the one she dramatised in her novel Octavia, ‘brought up in an atmosphere of Scotch austerity’ but with ‘a spiritual side to her nature which … tugged at her ...”

“... Stewart Parnell which took implicit but cheeky issue with his own magnum opus on the Chief. The young Bew – Belfast-born and a graduate of People’s Democracy marches as well as of the Cambridge history faculty – had already published a radical marxisant version of the 1879-82 Irish Land War, stressing the only partly suppressed war of interests ...”

“... non-committal titles. Inside the books her territory is classic – the love relationships of young people – but mapped with an unusual scrupulous smoothness. The characters are brainy, even startlingly so, but she doesn’t exalt their intelligence or flaunt her own. At the beginning of Normal People, Connell and Marianne are contemporaries at school ...”