“... of beer. It was always said that he wrote from the world of these men, and in their language. But Michael King’s biography, Frank Sargeson: A Life, published in 1995, told a different story. In 1929, Norris Davey, a junior government clerk, was convicted under New Zealand’s anti-homosexuality laws. To avoid prison, he denied his sexuality, and gave ...”

“... that he’s ‘wonderfully handsome’, or (at first) that Hans Castorp looks like ‘an ordinary young man’. We couldn’t describe them to a police sketch artist and expect to get anything back. Gatsby, first spotted, is ‘standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure ...”

“... flames, still recite sacred epics. But as time passed in the West, clever scissorwork became a young woman’s skill, and dropped below stairs; the bastard progeny of the paper cut are the doily and the cutlet frill. Yet Lotte Reiniger, a Berliner who died in London in 1981, adapted the craft to make experimental ‘shadow films’, as she called ...”

“... UK on Sky Atlantic, was nominated for five Emmys and made much of by everyone from Lorrie Moore to Michael Bloomberg. Before this, 26-year-old Dunham had made short films, web comedy series and two movies – the best and best-known thing she’s done so far is the movie Tiny Furniture – in which she also plays women her own age, slouching towards adulthood ...”

“... of success can serve to push them further and further away from their talent. If a bright young director survives this malarkey and makes a second great hit, in Hollywood he is no longer a genius but a prophet. His relationship with reality is then likely to be beyond talking about, and unlike the successful novelist, say, or the smart ...”

“... were by now enthusiastically clambering onto the bandwagon. First out of the traps was the brash young defence secretary, Gavin Williamson. The Sun’s report, he said, shows why Corbyn cannot be trusted: ‘Time and time again he has sided with those who want to destroy everything that is great about this country.’ On 18 February the story moved up a ...”

“... Ionce​ drove to Forest Lawn Memorial Park. It was before Michael Jackson had his crypt there, but I remember finding Walt Disney’s grave and that of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. A few writers are there too: Theodore Dreiser, who wrote well about department stores in Sister Carrie, and Clifford Odets, who believed shopping was one of America’s chronic diseases ...”

“... to live in. O’Faolain may agree with me. In the Preface to the Penguin book, he says that as a young man he was very romantic, that his style took pleasure in such words as ‘dawn’, ‘dew’, ‘onwards’, ‘youth’, ‘world’, ‘adamant’ and ‘dusk’. I could extend the list, but it is already long enough to make the point that his early ...”

“... the temperature by one degree. The fire is just to burn those who don’t drown As too full of young voices she goes down. This is the finest hour of Mail and Star. The Sun especially is cock-a-hoop, Shouting commands as if at Trafalgar. Swab out the trunnion cleats and calk that poop! What terrifying warriors they are, These slewed slop-slingers of the ...”

“... are worthy of Benjamin Franklin) one asks one’s self what one is doing in that galère.’ Michael Anesko’s strikingly authoritative ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship gives a good many detailed and salutary answers in its essential account of exactly what James was doing in his conduct of his career as a ...”

“... the purposes of life now reigns in the thinking stratum of Chinese society, especially among the young. David Rice’s Dragon’s Brood is a marvellously fresh and immediate evocation of this confusion at what one might call the first level of perception – that of the serious visit. Rice is innocent of any real knowledge of Chinese culture or Chinese ...”

“... at University College, Oxford, before he finally met W.H. Auden. It was not for want of trying. Michael, Spender’s elder brother, an insufferable turbo-brain at Balliol, had known Auden at school and kept in touch, but refused to arrange an introduction for Stephen, fearing, as Spender later put it, that ‘in producing me he would be playing the weakest ...”

“... with him; but there were always the faithful who remembered and read him, and a few years ago his young man’s trilogy from the early Thirties, Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky, was republished. Personality is important for a cult. The life must be close to the work, and almost but not quite a substitute for it, while the work itself is intimate with ...”

“... interesting thing about the writer in question. Often, though, this invented self is a problem. Michael Wood’s oustandingly brilliant new book is in part a corrective to the public persona adopted by his subject. Wood calls this persona ‘Nabokov the mandarin’, and robustly describes it as ‘a set ... of ...”

“... sit and write in perfect solitude.’ From Rome she headed to the Swiss Alps, where she envied the young men taking off for the high passes, and then back through Italy and Germany to Paris and London, before settling in for some months at the top of an old Venetian palace: A rather dark & very winding stairway, with mysterious doors & unexpected ...”