“... been, but one of the boys panicked in his embarrassment, and ran off to escape the laughter of the young women. Since he was the one who had the money, the other boy had to leave too. Now they tell each other the story once again, in great detail, ‘each one completing the memories of the other’. One of them says: ‘That’s the best thing we ever ...”

“... translations do us proud. M. de Charlus’s evening, and indeed his whole relationship with the young violinist, Charlie Morel, has been wrecked by the scheming and cattish Mme Verdurin. The Queen of Naples sweeps him away from the party, managing a finely casual bit of rudeness as she does so. Mme Verdurin approaches, eager to talk to her royal guest, and ...”

“... we might connect his prodigious if uneven writing with his dizzying array of concerns.Like many a young writer, Morris already had an income. When he came of age in 1855, he began drawing an annuity of £900. His father, a bill broker turned gentleman who bought his own coat of arms, had died in 1847, leaving the family his mining investments. Although Hanson ...”

“... That is their greatness.’ Benn’s star seems to be in the ascendant again, judging by the young and very productive East Berlin poet Durs Grünbein’s hard-bitten urban topographies, though it is surely the case that however much eclipsed his reputation as a dramatist, Brecht’s example as a poet will always serve as a stumbling-block to poetic ...”

“... of personality by paraphrasing the recollections in his own words. Only Imogen Holst and Sir Michael Tippett have escaped this platitudinous reworking since their contributions had appeared previously elsewhere, and the effect of their words is of a far higher intensity than that of the others’. The absurd though sympathetic grandeur of Tippett’s ...”

“... champion and a Shakespearian scholar, speaking in witty, allusive pentameters; Richard Morphy, his young American challenger, with a suitably wilder six-stress line, barely controlled by a caesura in the middle. Staunton addresses his wife, while Morphy writes to his mother, and both women, though silent, are felt as strong dramatic presences. The epigraph, a ...”

“... Village because nothing ever happens there.’ Perry Scholes, the protagonist and narrator of Michael Symmons Roberts’s first novel, Patrick’s Alphabet, is obsessed with Weegee. Perry is a modern ambulance chaser who patrols the suburban ‘edgelands’ of the M4 corridor and the M25 in self-conscious imitation of the master. He tunes in to the police ...”

“... emerged.’ So many rumours are circulating in South America about the British Paratroops burning young peasant boys alive that the facts of the situation ought to be established. I would hesitate to blame the Paras for this act. But I do blame politicians in Argentina and Britain who unleashed the conditions for such horror, without making any effort to ...”

“... Farson, in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (also 1993), gives it a passing reference. Michael Peppiatt, in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (2008), gives the year of Bacon’s departure for the cottage as 1942, adding: ‘The enforced idleness, free of wartime anxieties and the distractions of London, served as a catalyst to his real ...”

“... career. Since his retirement from the Civil Service, publications have come more frequently. Michael Schmidt, his colleague on PN Review, has promoted his work; and Donald Davie, in one of those hot flushes that make his criticism so unpredictable and exciting, has declared Sisson’s ‘The Usk’ to be ‘one of the great poems of our ...”

“... Michael Leapman has chosen what seems a presumptuous title for his book about the BBC. After all, the BBC is a bit like Russia – with an endless capacity to absorb criticism, punishment, even invasion, and still come out on top. A year ago Auntie was reeling from a barrage of punches from every direction. In the right corner were the privateers, the de-regulators, and the lobby who wanted to commercialise it ...”

“... very unhappy. The guiding star of his youth has entirely vanished from his firmament. In 1975 the young Gordon Brown compiled, edited and published a socialist manifesto entitled Red Paper for Scotland. At 24, he had just completed a three-year term as rector of Edinburgh University and chaired the University Court in the face of continuous opposition from ...”

“... in the Sligo area, where he lives. With writers such as Eugene McCabe, Tom McIntyre and Michael Harding he shares a commitment to local territories of the imagination and their distinct idioms, giving us access to a set of rich dialects and views of the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, setting up a healthy opposition to the Dublin/London ...”

“... from the Conservative Party. Its two transport frontbenchers in the Commons, up-and-coming young hopefuls called Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine, welcomed the transfer, and specifically stated that this would enable the Council, if it felt like it, to hold transport fares down with a subsidy from the ...”

“... Strane with her therapist; she trusts that nobody else will understand. ‘It wasn’t about how young I was, not for him,’ she explains in a summary introduction that primes the reader for a lengthy statement of denial.Above everything else, he loved my mind. He said I had genius-level emotional intelligence and that I wrote like a prodigy, that he could ...”