“... okay’. He was eighteen or twenty, stocky, dressed in black windcheater and jeans, with a short haircut and cold eyes. We later discovered he wore old socks on his hands. ‘If you’re okay,’ René went on, ‘what are you doing crouching in somebody’s front garden in the middle of the night?’ ‘What the fuck business is it of ...”

“... appeared and transformed his life. He now teaches creative writing at MIT. For young American short-story writers casting about for inspiration in the 1990s, two books showed the way. The first was Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son (1992), a collection of autobiographical stories revolving around the misadventures of a character known mostly as Fuckhead. It ...”

“... for a delayed easyJet flight from Stansted to Belfast and enduring all the usual privations of short-haul, low-cost flying: being shunted from gate to gate, and from sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge to sky-blue-upholstered departure lounge; and being jostled, and jostling, on this occasion in the very burly company of the young men and women of the ...”

“... Library: it depicts the Battle of Gisors in 1198 between the armies of Richard I of England and Philip II.The chroniclers’ shaping of the public perception of these kings, and their construction of a particular kind of history of the dynasty, is an underlying, if undeveloped, theme of Firnhaber-Baker’s book. The vivid character sketches, scurrilous ...”

“... of the Sidney family since the middle of the 16th century. The most famous of the Sidneys, Sir Philip, included an affectionate account of Penshurst in his Arcadia, where it is thinly disguised as the house of Kalendar. A generation later Ben Jonson’s poem ‘To Penshurst’ celebrated the house as a landmark of antique virtue and antique ...”

“... consistency to his anxieties about the brutalisation of the cinema and of American culture. A short piece, called ‘Despising what you sell’, records the distress he felt when he had a part-time job in the United Artists distribution office in Düsseldorf: the whole loveless commercialised industry gave rise not only to soulless exhibition but to ...”

“... masterpiece set in darkest Brooklyn, The Assistant, as well as four or five of the best American short stories I’d ever read (or ever will). The other stories weren’t bad either. In the early Fifties I was reading Malamud’s stories, later collected in The Magic Barrel, as they appeared – the very moment they appeared – in Partisan Review and the ...”

“... Alice Thomas Ellis has to tell us. But then, innovation has never really been among her interests. Philip Norman isn’t much given to making it new, either. Words of Love is a collection of short fiction haunted by memory. The title story nostalgically records a shabby childhood made bearable by music. It revisits territory ...”

“... that have held out against the global trend to market economies and rising living standards,’ Philip Hammond, the chancellor of the Exchequer, noted during his speech in Manchester, ‘but it is only a few. Like Cuba, which I visited last year as foreign secretary, where, curiously, I found cows in the fields but no milk in the shops … That’s what ...”

“... an hour before daybreak – are unsurpassable.In his Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse, Philip Larkin included seven of Sassoon’s poems; only Yeats and Hardy had significantly more. True, Larkin’s anthology was denounced by Donald Davie and others as a counterblast against Modernism. But it can’t be denied that Sassoon’s war poems share with ...”

“... brilliance and intergalactic dunce-hood. I merely smiled in imitation of his lovely wife. Prince Philip is a pure catch for a dramatist. Imagine nearly seventy years in the mellow afterglow of someone else’s radiance, two steps behind, a man infantilised beyond belief, provided with everything in return for being a constant second. It’s not such an ...”

“... rhetorical currency required for any respectable courtship or commercial transaction. As a boy, Philip Sidney – whose works Richardson was later to publish, and to study with attention – was carefully trained in the art of letter writing. His bedroom, according to his early biographer Thomas Moffet, ‘overflowed with elegant epistles’ which he had ...”

“... Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell, Edward Marsh, Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, Philip Heseltine, Mark Gertler. The letters to Russell tell a particularly vivid story. Lawrence harassed Russell relentlessly and at great length, repetitiously and in a wilfully unpleasant tone. He kept on banging away at Russell’s vaunted rationality, his ...”

“... teacher. The strenuous life of study was here, and something beyond mere study. Two unnerving short entries appear, one following the other: 11/21/49 Excellently staged performance of Don Giovanni last night (City Center). Today, a wonderful opportunity was offered me – to do some research work for a soc[iology] instructor named ...”

“... Isabel) Jakowicz believes, the Lipstick Man? Such facetiousness is characteristic of Philip Kerr’s uncertain tone. In the moment after this jokiness, Jake flushes with anger at the callousness of her fellow detectives, who fail to recognise that the victim ‘had once been a beautiful young woman with her whole future in front of her’. But ...”