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“... think I am temperamentally a mystic, he says. He believes Wordsworth and Blake and George Fox and Philip K. Dick. But he excludes from the dimension of greater meaning the ascetic practices of the modern day. We engage in them, certainly: ‘hot yoga, ceaseless meditation, extreme fasting, various forms of detox, excessive exercise and compulsive devotion to ...”

“... with whom he never came to a lasting understanding was Montfort (yet another brother-in-law).In short, nothing could be less like the conventional idea of a pugnacious Plantagenet than the fair nine-year-old child who came to the throne in 1216, already weeping, in circumstances that would have taxed a Churchill or a Napoleon. Henry laboured all through his ...”

“... poems appeared he appalled friends by marrying Jane, the daughter of a stable keeper, and then got Philip Webb to build the Red House for his family just south of London. Although once canonised as the first modernist dwelling on account of its simple layout and truth to materials, Morris described it as ‘very medieval in spirit’. Perhaps too ...”

“... the same time’. Yourcenar’s career had begun.There is a picture of Yourcenar from 1936, hair short, expression neutral and collar turned up. Her eyes are still, her eyebrows bushy; her lips are held together but the bottom one is plump, available. She had started to throw her heart around a bit: she had an affair with a married mother called Lucy ...”

“... is it he’s less well thought of than, say, twenty years ago. Because he’s not long dead is the short answer and also, I suppose, because the literary scene has changed, with no one critic presiding in the way Connolly and (to a lesser extent) Raymond Mortimer did. The only time I met Connolly was in 1968 – when my first play, Forty Years On, was in ...”

“... Oddingley Grange on Trench Lane, whose châtelaine was a Mrs White, aunt of Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Robinson, commanding officer of the Royal Artillery 67th Field Regiment, Territorial Army. Lt Col Robinson approved, and a gruff handshake transformed my father into a second lieutenant, though he had to serve his time as a failed schoolteacher until June ...”

“... in McGahern’s early novels – The Barracks (1963), The Dark (1965) – and in some of his best short stories. ‘Gugering,’ Frank Shovlin explains in a footnote, ‘is the act of dropping seed potatoes into holes in the ground.’ Uncle Pat, he suggests, is a model for the fictional character ‘The Shah’ in McGahern’s final novel, That They Might ...”

“... Waugh once said, when a campaign to place a plaque to Matthew Arnold in Westminster Abbey was cut short by a letter from the Dean informing him that there already was one, ‘I am still sure that there is a point to be made, even if I am no longer quite so sure what it is.’ Besides, there is now, whatever negative view one takes of Murdoch, one huge thing ...”

“... Atlas discusses a scene in ‘Something to Remember Me By’, one of Bellow’s most affecting short stories. While Bellow does share with the character some similarities in family background, this hardly allows a supposition that Louie, in confessing to his son, is revealing the circumstances of Bellow’s supposed failure to mourn. Atlas ...”

“... older sister Rita. Rita Lydig – her second husband was a wealthy New York businessman, Philip Lydig – was like one of Edith Wharton’s spoiled anti-heroines: sexy, insane, theatrical, improvident and entrancingly beautiful. She appears – a wanton in Worth gowns – in countless memoirs of Old New York. Men held her in near-cultic ...”

“... band in 1932, nonetheless appeared in minstrel blackface in the same year’s musical short, Dream House. It went with the territory. Henderson’s saxophone and brass subsequently double the tempo in the recording, as though they’re trying to dash away from the compromising lyrics. They can’t, notwithstanding a lovely, full-bodied concluding ...”

“... As I was starting to write this I came across a poem by Philip Larkin, the last part of which reads: And once you have walked the length of your mind, what You command is as clear as a lading-list. Anything else must not, for you, be thought To exist. And what’s the profit? Only that, in time We half-identify the blind impress All our behavings bear, may trace it home ...”

“... began to think about Judith Hearne when he was 27, in exile from Belfast, and trying to write short stories in a remote part of Ontario: ‘I thought of this old lady who used to come to our house. She was a spinster who had some Civil Service job to do with sanitation and she lived most of her life with her “dear aunt”. They’d not been ...”

“... they tell of how much sleep has been missed, but because they bring the next day nearer. As Philip Larkin, poet of limits, knew so well, sleep has the one big disadvantage that we wake up from it: ‘In time the curtain edges will grow light,’ he wrote in ‘Aubade’, bringing ‘Unresting death, a whole day nearer now’. For Tristan and ...”

“... opportunities for amplification and further collections in the years to come.’ In 1999, when Philip Horne edited Henry James: A Life in Letters, which remains the best single selection of James’s letters – the greatest hits, all 296 of them, superbly annotated and put in context – he pointed out that half of the letters he had included had not been ...”