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“... obsessed with the cinema, and with American rock music in those favouring Sixties. They started young and went to film school, directing their first features at the end of that decade, each thus joining a rising group of film-makers: Scorsese associated with America’s ‘Movie-Brats’ (Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas), Wenders with the ‘New German ...”

“... of the Wyon family, a well-known family of London medal-makers, and one of its faces shows a young frock-coated pathologist seated on an elegant stool in a laboratory equipped with Fin de Siècle bacteriological equipment. In his hand he is holding a heart, which he is gazing at intently. As the scene is a London teaching hospital one can be quite ...”

“... his publisher, he fell ‘headlong into the gutter’, he was ‘constantly being humiliated’. Michael Bloch, who knew his subject well for many years, is a tactful, sensitive but not an indulgent biographer. His book conveys the contradictions of character and circumstance out of which this complicated, elusive but attractive personality evolved towards ...”

“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space ...”

“... in front of it or below it. In Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (1994), Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxendall have described the way this works with Tiepolo’s Four Continents – the ceiling of the staircase in the Würzburg Residenz – where ambiguities that defy geometrical analysis seem to exploit the changes in the architectural environment as ...”

“... the 7-1 outsider and the only first novel on the list – is narrated by Dolores Gauci, a young girl whose Maltese father gambled away his Cardiff café on the day she was born. Frank Gauci is a weak, compulsive man who ignores the difficulties of his family and hides behind the pages of the Sporting Life. Azzopardi has a keen sense of the shame of ...”

“... the frozen movements of people and things. Many potential points of origin are in the frame. Yes, Michael Schmidt’s eloquent and understated city scenes, Berlin nach 45, show the empty spaces left by the destruction of the city in the Second World War. But there is just as much that points to different origins: the erasure of war’s traces and wounds, for ...”

“... the many levels of darkness and violence in this ‘home’. In the meantime, though, he was a young writer in Dublin, gleefully attacking his elders. On Seán Ó Faoláin: ‘I have had no contact with him except through his work and it has always seemed phoney to me.’ On the novelist Kate O’Brien: ‘I find literary people bore me to almost the point ...”

“... impulses of their enemies. ‘It’s no fun to protest on an empty stomach,’ said Mayor Michael Bloomberg to assembled journalists, ‘so you might want to try a restaurant. Or you might want to go shopping, maybe for another pair of sneakers for the march.’ New York is a Democrat city, but also a famous backdrop, and the Republicans took the ...”

“... believed him to be at fault, as in his personal attitude towards official and public reactions to Michael Fagan’s invasion of the Queen’s bedroom. Already, after Lord Mountbatten’s murder, McNee, with the approval of the Palace and the Home Secretary, had appointed a working party of his own senior officers to review current policy and practice for the ...”

“... Party cells in Addis Ababa before the revolution, and about the pre-revolutionary splits among the young Marxists). No less surprising is the failure to mention any of Professor Richard Pankhurst’s works, notably his Economic History of Ethiopia. A number of rather blatant prejudices stand in the way of accurate analysis and explanation. For ...”

“... in a girdered hive.(‘Let Me Measure My Prayer with Sleep’)Such lines exemplify something Michael Schmidt once identified in Graham’s voice as ‘a strange hostility towards the reader’. The influence of Dylan Thomas has often been noticed, and the effect of the densely packed verbalism is, as in Thomas, principally to imply the labour that has ...”

“... equality of opportunity are based.But what is a ‘genuine sense’ of meritocracy? When, in 1958, Michael Young put the term into general circulation with the publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy (he did not, as is often assumed, coin the term), the suffix pointed to an analogy with democracy or aristocracy as forms of rule or government. It ...”

“... herself. She knew that ‘superficial knowledge and flash’ were not enough when it came to her young lover Michael Bruce’s preparation for what she hoped would be a career in British politics. She excoriated travellers’ tales of the East that only scratched surfaces, including Lamartine’s celebrated Voyage en ...”

“... the publication of Alex Garland’s first novel, The Beach, one of cinema’s most fashionable young directors (Danny Boyle) and its most adored male star (Leonardo Di Caprio) are about to make a film version of it, a remarkable achievement for an author of 28, but in other ways an inevitable one. Few novels are so influenced by film as this one, in its ...”