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“... to work out what to say. Thank you for coming. You’re looking well. (Exceedingly so for people straight out of terminal wards.) Ask them where they’re living. ‘We’re having a fine old time,’ my father says, ‘moving around, staying in hotels.’ I do not have to tell them yet I’ve sold the house. ‘This is a nice party,’ my mother ...”

“... knew that once we had the pleureuse, the steel helmet was only a matter of time, that there’s a straight path from the modesty veil to the gas mask, and from the pergola to the trenches.’ Much of the best imagery and circumstance of those years is taken from the German painters Franz Marc (1880-1916) and especially August Macke (1887-1914), currently the ...”

“... POW camp in Belgium. Even more arresting than the dates are the places. Böll marches the reader straight back to the absurd moment of the vast extension of German power (and horrendous lines of communication). It’s not just that it’s 1943 or 1944, it’s that Andreas is trundling south-east through Poland, through the Ukraine, perhaps beyond. Time is ...”

“... I retreated to my thoughts.I felt sure that I had made Vikram Seth appear by thinking about him. Michael Holme, the narrator of An Equal Music, makes the love of his life appear by thinking about her. He’s sitting on a bus in Oxford Street when another bus draws alongside, and there she is: Julia McNicholl, or Julia Hansen as she now is, though ...”

“... of the glove-making and wool-dealing business and into the theatre – and allows Shapiro to get straight to the much more interesting question, often skimped in such books, of what Shakespeare’s working life, the bit that made him matter, actually consisted of from one week and month to the next. Shapiro describes how he thinks the playwright spent 1599 ...”

“... teleology’ links the 1890s in France with the years between the two world wars. ‘There is no straight line that can be drawn from the conflicts of the Fin de Siècle to the emergence of fascism in the 1930s,’ she writes; elsewhere, that the affair was ‘no dress rehearsal’ for later developments. At first glance this insistence is puzzling. The line ...”

“... out, writing of the Muslim reverence for Muhammad and the Quran, why Rushdie’s allegory goes straight for the jugular. By invoking a distinction (between the area of Islamic rule and the area of alien rule) crucial to Islamic law’s understanding of its own dominion, he explains why Khomeini’s death sentence was ultra vires. He argues that the source ...”

“... on for 450 pages, cracking up in the wake of the death of his mistress. First she wanted him to go straight, and to sleep with no one else; then it turned out she had cancer; then she died. This is too much for Morris, better known as Mickey. He falls out with his wife, leaves his home in northern New England; stays with an old friend and colleague in New ...”

“... its own history and outlook; one wouldn’t have thought it was load-bearing, or could go in a straight line, but it is and does. The curl, the interference, the constant heckling tuppen’orth of the ungrammatical, island-inflected speech carries the massy, chronological work of recollection forwards in three same-sized parts, each comprised of 20 trim ...”

“... the facts of ‘what really passed between them’ is doomed to failure in advance. Neither Michael Bloch’s cautious scholarship nor Osbert Sitwell’s posthumous malice will erode posterity’s obstinate penchant for romantic love. Having said that, it has to be admitted that both the volumes under review are full of historical insights of the most ...”

“... the hated name Spears, and ordered that they be disbanded next day and the ‘Spirettes’ sent straight back to England. But it was ‘Mary Borden’ who wrote in Journey Down a Blind Alley, what, for my money, is the best thumbnail sketch of the man who had harried and harassed her husband and snubbed her. The Spearses had a son, ...”

“... Reprint Library, with (as readers of the London Review of Books will know) an Introduction by Michael Holroyd, which identifies ‘David Peterley’ as an artistic fiction and argues a persuasive case for the book’s worth and raison d’être. Let me dwell a moment or two on the ‘crime’ aspect. Publishers like to exploit the weakness for mystery of ...”

“... subjects) with his stubbly, slightly stooping distrust of the camera. The curled and freckled Mr Michael Rooney, who in his smock and kerchief seems to look at us straight out of a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph from the 1860s. The long-necked poise of Mrs Barbara Hyslop, the intimate textures of dark hair and fine ...”

“... Nor is there much point or much justice in saying that ‘Faulkner’s world ... is crafted straight from vacancy into myth and symbol’: you could just as reasonably say it’s crafted straight from the soil or from history or from the defeat of the South. Bayley lets these exaggerations rip when he feels, reading a ...”

“... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ‘the ...”