“... a heavy shadow that dogs her like an obligation. In her novel Les Samouraïs (1990), her young alter ego is called ‘a bull-dozer’. We don’t have to go as far as that, even if it is said to be ‘the best of compliments’. Kristeva arrives at elegance, even brio, but only after cautious preparations, as if a plane were to need the length of ...”

“... some of Davie’s most delicate poems concern quiet and all too ordinary emotional desperations. A young woman in Iowa lacks ‘the ease of heart’ to see what she might have seen if she had not been so brutalised by poverty, and such ease does not feel like a luxury, some lightweight adjunct to a life. In another poem an English woman can’t leave the ...”

“... Australian politics attracts few first-rate people. Whitlam would have made his mark anywhere. The young and hopeful responded to Whitlam as to a new messiah. But the liberal-minded middle-aged, too, were heartened by his programmes and rhetoric. Even the heartlands of conservatism were disarmed to discover that Labor had elected a leader who, as I recall one ...”

“... New Poems (1908); Duino Elegies (1923), Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). His Letters to a Young Poet (1903) have also been treasured by several generations of readers, often readers who are not otherwise much interested in modern poets. This scheme and these dates suggest a perfectionist writer, writing only sparely, much at the mercy of his ...”

“... film was first shot. After Bogart and Bacall were married, Hawks, Faulkner, Bogart, Bacall and the young female scriptwriter Leigh Brackett wrote and improvised more. The result was to separate Vivian from her evil sister and create the happy marriage of Thirties screwball comedy and Forties hardboiled noir. ‘When you see the film of The Big ...”

“... Where Yarmouth bloaters grew,     Selling Tom-tits five a fardin     To unhappy young Leboo! No one, however, would actually want to claim that this provocatively sported walrus was a direct source for the better-known specimen that consorts with the Carpenter. One of the curious phenomena which we can be grateful to Malcolm’s book for ...”

“... in the Country’, ‘The Villebon Way and the Meséglise Way’, ‘A Stay at the Seaside’, ‘Young Girls’, ‘Noble Names’ and ‘Venice’. She lists those elements that will reappear in some form in À la recherche:The grandmother in the garden, the goodnight kiss, the drama of going to bed, the walks towards Meséglise and Guermantes, the farewell ...”

“... Both versions have the allusion I have just spotted to the song ‘Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life’ by Young and Herbert (from Naughty Marietta). ‘At last I’ve found thee,’ the line continues, picking up the idea of finding pain when paradise is lost, or has lost us. ‘Mistery’ suggests missing mastery as well as what we don’t know. Another ...”

“... line, a first-person narrative by the writer himself. The narrative recounts his meeting with the young woman who will become his typist. This structure continues for some twenty pages. Then the page splits into three and the typist gets her own first-person narrative. From now on the three modes occupy almost every page of the novel, although every now and ...”

“... to the north and west as harmlessly or dangerously archaic margins (much as I did as a young tourist), and set out accordingly to placate or subjugate them as circumstances dictated, what lay across the seas to the south and east was another matter altogether. The border with Scotland could be legally abolished in 1707 because for the English what ...”

“... mine,’ Stephen Dedalus thinks while talking to an English priest in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The language isn’t the priest’s and isn’t Stephen’s, but the priest talks as if he owned it and Stephen feels he never will. Neither, we may wish to recall, has any other language except those he has learned in school. There are 16 official ...”

“... an amateur Jewish police force composed of local thugs, ‘the Jews’ very own deviants’, as young Philip puts it, sounding very much like his older self. When three Jews get killed in the skirmishing, ‘it wasn’t necessarily because they were Jews’ (‘though it didn’t hurt,’ Philip’s Uncle Monty adds). That ‘necessarily’, along with ...”

“... writes that Péguy ‘was calling for [Jaurès’s] blood: figuratively, it must be said; though a young madman, who may or may not have been oversusceptible to metaphor, almost immediately shot Jaurès through the head’. I used to wonder how figurative the call was; and I was sure the killer was not moved by a metaphor. Now I wonder about the afterlife of ...”

“... Alzheimer’s disease. But there is no sense of the writer in the film. We just get the sprightly young woman, the honoured dame and the person lost in her later life. What did I want? Shots of Murdoch at her desk? Walking around, waiting for inspiration? No, just a feeling, on film or in criticism, that the writing, the construction of sentences and the ...”

“... sexual fantasy skits’. She played native girls from the Empire in love with dashing young Frenchmen – a role Baker and Pepito had anticipated in their novel, My Blood in Your Veins, where the heroine’s blood transfusions save a white man’s life. She would repeat it in her variant of Offenbach’s La Créole and in her films of 1933 and ...”