“... 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 ...”

“... then nineteen or twenty, told her mother that she was writing a novel and that it was about a young man’s adventures in the South of France, her mother had apparently said: ‘I’m a much more interesting subject than your dreamt-up young man.’ (‘Billi’ was what her family called the ...”

“... plays has been televisioned, as you say/KatUllus izza poek; all right. vurry good eggzesize fer young Jaz ... Anyhow lez see the new muggerzeum as fer Horse/trail/ier?? Gheez you are a glutton fer punishment ... or are you doin’ it to allay fambly suspicion?? If Hostrailia cd/sing Bach, muvver!!! As fer Murdering the CareDRAWL ... waal no new ...”

“... If language speaks us, as Lacan claimed, and as Aron – the young protagonist of The Book of Intimate Grammar – senses intuitively, then our thoughts are trapped in hand-me-down forms and even the act of investigating and naming the self is both arbitrary and suspect. A lost language would mean a misplaced self; and indeed, Aron has caught a fleeting and provocative glimpse of a shadow father behind the father he knows, a lithe and animated Papa who is telling a joke in the Polish forbidden by Mama, and who is attached like a vibrant ghost to the sad overweight present-day Papa, the one who protests forlornly: ‘But there are some things I can only say in Polish ...”

“... which seem to cancel themselves out – not prose and not a poem. John Ashbery has called this young Californian ‘a stunning new voice in American poetry’. It is difficult to agree. Clary spills mild thoughts in hazy paragraphs. Terrified of the literal, she speaks with a confident evasiveness. The result is strange, puffy gossip. There is no way to ...”

“... Karl brings out the malice of rivalry in it). His invitation in distinguished middle age to young women to come and inspect his valuable etchings (alias the manuscripts of his famous novels) may have been as pardonable as it was pathetic, given the Strindbergean state of his marriage. But the unguarded remark he made to his only daughter Jill is a ...”

“... Excalibur perhaps, links up the parts of the novel and is symbolic in its action. A Welshman, David Jones, runs away to sea, survives the sinking of the Titanic, becomes a cook in New York, marries Ludmilla, the daughter of his Russian employer, returns to Wales and the First World War. He is in Ireland during the Rebellion and, because he is posted as ...”

“... one point co-founding the Harvill Press. Flora’s husband, a Boys Own Paper sort of chap crippled young by a kick from his horse, was obliquely immortalised by W.H. Auden: Will you wheel death anywhere In his invalid chair. Auden briefly and reluctantly tutored their son, and his nocturnal hospitality to Christopher Isherwood was announced with distaste by ...”

“... considered sinful in their time: they are Rahab the harlot, Bathsheba who was tempting to King David, Tamar who coaxed her father-in-law – and even Ruth, who crept under the bedclothes of Boaz, her kinsman. Does not this suggest that Matthew wanted to show that Mary was descended from ‘sinners’? This is far-fetched. We are not convinced that Matthew ...”

“... it might as accurately have been captioned ‘Your Country Needs ME.’ From the moment when, as a young captain doing survey work on Cyprus in 1883, he managed to secure a timely transfer to Egypt by arranging for two telegrams to be sent asking for his release, so that he could safely decline the first, thus gaining credit for what Trevor Royle calls his ...”

“... beaten up by disorderly revellers at Halloween. Many, too, will sympathise with the group of young people on their way home from Catechism at Westbury on Severn in 1610, who fell to ‘dancing and quaffing’, and deriding the doctrine of their minister. This incident gave rise to some fifty prosecutions, for drunkenness, fornication, bearing bastards ...”

“... his own emotions ebbed and flowed. In April 1915 he was ‘mad with misery and hostility’ over David Garnett’s entanglement with Bloomsbury homosexuality. A year later came Lawrence’s abortive effort at blutbrüderschaft with John Middleton Murry. In the summer of 1918 Lawrence probably consummated his infatuation with the Cornish farmer, William ...”

“... Web of Corruption, which tells the story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith. Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor took eight years to research and write their analysis of the most far-reaching corruption trial of this century. The opening summary is startling. Of those prosecuted in connection with Poulson 21 were convicted on corruption charges. There were ...”

“... his grandmother, but not to any of his siblings, displaced as they were around the plantation.As a young boy he was stoical and resourceful. He had a habit of singing outside the window of Lucretia Auld, his owner’s daughter – a ploy she ‘very soon came to understand as a petition for a piece of bread’. He was exposed to countless acts of brutality: a ...”

“... of the early 1990s. Over the Barlow Clowes fiasco, the Government, represented by Ernst and Young, sued Touche Ross; over BCCI, Touche Ross sued Ernst and Young and Price Waterhouse. Over Atlantic Computers, Price Waterhouse sued Touche Ross. Over Wallace Smith, KPMG sued Coopers and Lybrand. Over London United ...”