“... Fornes had it at her sparky fingertips. As an artist she was the real McCoy, Sontag’s friend Stephen Koch observed: ‘Not a pretend one, and not a critic, and not a discussant, and not a graduate student making notes.’ She was, in short, a natural. When it came to sex and art and many basic day-to-day activities, Sontag wasn’t a natural, being ...”

“... which none of the books mentions. In one of his novels, Patrick O’Brian has his character Stephen Maturin say: ‘Have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong?’ Cherie (I’m going to call her that to avoid confusion with the other Blair) has a village reputation which stresses her ambivalent relationship with fame and her obsession with ...”

“... Street, which I do regularly, I hardly ever think about Leopold Bloom and the Kilkenny People or Stephen Daedalus and the ghost of Hamlet’s father, even if I decide to walk the route down Kildare Street and past the National Library. I studied in the National Library almost every weekday between 1973 and 1975, and it is easier to wonder who stole my yellow ...”

“... novelists. American fiction’s most single-minded portrait of the goy is in The Assistant by Bernard Malamud. The goy is Frank Alpine, the down-and-out thief who robs the failing grocery store of the Jew, Bober, later attempts to rape Bober’s studious daughter, and eventually, in a conversion to Bober’s brand of suffering Judaism, symbolically ...”

“... is concerned. They turn the sickle side of the moon to [the] world: the globe to the other.’ To Stephen Spender she wrote in more violent terms, suggesting not so much self-absorption as self-demolition: ‘I dont think you can get your words to come till youre almost unconscious; and unconsciousness only comes when youve been beaten and broken and gone ...”

“... had choice, and who had failed in the choice. Devine has something in common with Mr Madden and Bernard Rice the landlady’s son, the two male figures in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. He is underimagined; there is a crudity and lack of subtlety in his creation. When he overhears two colleagues undermining his masculinity, we are told that ‘he had ...”

“... literary fiction; Parker excerpts a climactic scene in which the married but homosexual writer Bernard Sands is the excited witness to a young gay man’s arrest for importuning in Leicester Square – a moment almost too complex to be properly grasped in a short extract. There is also Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960), a marvellously ...”

“... every night. The message was clear: young men would have to give up everything for Ireland. George Bernard Shaw later said that it was a play ‘which might lead a man to do something foolish’. Lennox Robinson wrote that it ‘made more rebels in Ireland than a thousand political speeches or a hundred reasoned books’.Now, at the end of his life, almost a ...”

“... sorts of people turned up for the weekend; the guest list in the interwar years included George Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, H.G. Wells, Mary Pickford, Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin – even Gandhi. David’s prolonged exposure to celebrities in his childhood meant that they held no fear for him as an adult. Sometimes, when Nancy got ...”

“... the magazine. It was taken up in a TLS editorial; there was also a big Guardian piece about it, by Bernard Bergonzi. I’ve lots of cuttings; at that time I used to keep cuttings. In the next issue there was a long essay by Colin, ‘Dreams and Responsibilities’, about Al’s New Poetry anthology which was as near to a manifesto as the magazine ever had, and ...”

“... his mother, who was overcome by smoke on the landing. He went into the flat of Raymond ‘Moses’ Bernard, a kind, well-known old gentleman who lived on the 23rd floor with his dog, Marley. A great many of those who died ended up on this floor, Jessica included. Gary Maunders had also climbed the stairs to escape the smoke. ‘He used to try and scare us when ...”