“... conversation) that he has never been introduced to Woolf’s work: ‘My book’s sub-plot is Philip K. Dick, sales-talk, Hollywood and schitzophrenia.’ So I’m forced to describe Woolf in terms of Dick’s excellent ‘straight’ novels of the sliding life in the Western States, In Milton Lumky Territory and Humpty Dumpty in Oakland. The keenest ...”

“... never heard of. It was all terribly shocking. Thom was a great reader of novels. He disdained short fiction and didn’t read much non-fiction, unless it was Edward Gibbon or Darwin. I am nearly opposite in my tastes, but we did share our enthusiasms. Thom, for instance, thought Philip Roth was the cat’s miaow. I ...”

“... that, in his own small way, he would have given it a hard time. I am not sure what his reaction to Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist would have been. He would doubtless have admired the dedication of Roth’s ‘pure’ Communist, O’Day, but it is to Ira Ringold that my father would have instinctively warmed – to what Roth describes as ‘the sanity of ...”

“... fictionalised: a tragicomic riff on the Calverley story. A Yorkshire Tragedy, by contrast, is short and terse. No names are used: the speech headings are just ‘Husband’, ‘Wife’, ‘Servant’ and so on. Some of its wording comes direct from the Butter pamphlet, but the story is compressed into a dark, claustrophobic parable.In these twinned plays ...”

“... marital devotion and hints of what was to come. Early in December 1884, he wrote a brief note to Philip Griffiths, a 20-year-old from a wealthy family in Birmingham: ‘My dear Philip, I have sent a photo of myself for you to the care of Mr MacKay which I hope you will like and in return for it you are to send me one of ...”

“... of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the course of an admittedly strange and somewhat ...”

“... to produce a future citizen of Soviet America’.After twelve issues, two of the young editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, appalled by the Moscow show trials of 1936 and 1937, wrested the magazine from party control. The new PR emerged in December 1937. F.W. Dupee, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy were also on the masthead, as was George ...”

“... in the form of a crime novel or giallo. He had been reading Maigret, Father Brown, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe stories, and corresponding with his friend Renato Candida, a carabinieri officer in Agrigento whose own book, This Mafia, Sciascia had helped to get published in 1956. Candida was the model not only for Captain Bellodi but, Sciascia wrote in ...”

“... but someone decided to add extra pointed drama to the occasion – probably the abbot himself, Philip Ballard alias Hawford (medieval Benedictines tended to acquire a second monastic surname, often the place they had come from). The life of a monastery centres on worship, an intricate performance of chanted services rhythmically punctuating every day of ...”

“... referred to his rebel forces as the ‘Khmers noirs’. At the time, French public opinion made short shrift of small-scale military interventions in Africa. In June 1992 I alerted readers to what the Libération headline called ‘The Elysée’s Secret War’ in Rwanda – a deployment which had not been debated in parliament and had received almost no ...”

“... The essential decency of the bigot isn’t a theme Houellebecq can bring off, certainly at such short notice.By this stage​ of the novel the point of view has moved erratically away from Paul. Sometimes there seems no good reason for this shift, or drift, especially when Paul is in the room, as is the case when his boss, Bruno Juge, the finance ...”

“... In the Loop. How quickly Blair’s pose became exposed. As early as June 2000, his pet pollster Philip Gould was reporting their focus groups as saying that ‘TB is not believed to be real. He lacks conviction, he is all spin and presentation.’ It is a bitter irony that this image of him became fixed in the public mind just as he was beginning to embark ...”

“... skin between each sheet of paper, you align them bottom edge and long side, tapping the long and short sides sharply together on the surface of your desk, and if you type sharply you can get as many as six or eight copies, each slightly fainter than the one before.) Refills and spares. A cornucopia of everything you would never run out of. Paper glued into ...”

“... the Accademia in Venice. The shape of the panels is crucial. Each is 35 inches high and a little short of 16 inches wide; originally they may have been a few inches taller top and bottom. The tallness and narrowness seem meant to amplify the idea of elevation in panels one and two – Terrestrial Paradise is followed by a scene in which the elect are ...”

“... So Peterloo was incorporated into the Liberal as well as the Chartist pedigree: in 1874 a short account of it was published in Manchester as a Liberal election leaflet, and ‘Peterloo’ was the inscription on a memorial jug that John Bright preserved at One Ash throughout his life. Nor is the line from Hunt to Chartism as clear or as simple as ...”