“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... recollections of the happy times of Elgar and Vaughan Williams encouraged proposals that after Sir Michael Tippett, the next candidate for composer-laureate and international standard-bearer should be Tavener. As soon as a young or not-so-young composer in the post-Górecki era has been ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... other than in written notes. George was now next in line to the throne after his father, but the young duke and duchess of York soon found that royal powerlessness began at home. It took them years to rescue their eldest sons from the clutches of a sadistic nanny who cut short the boys’ meetings with their parents by administering cruel pinches. For all ...”

“... scripture to their compulsions with a magic literalism, as in the case of Margaret Joynt, a young woman who said she had the Star of Bethlehem in her eye. Then again, the hermeneutics of many churches were no less weird: Joynt belonged to the Catholic Apostolic Church, whose founders claimed to have the gift of speaking in tongues. It was the context ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... daughter. Lane sent his ‘emissaries’ with an ‘ultimatum’ that Morpurgo should allow the young couple an equivalent sum to what he, as a millionaire, could afford. Morpurgo, who was no millionaire, took offence. The in-laws never exchanged so much as another word for the rest of Lane’s life. At its best, when it is dealing with Lane’s ...”

“... of the judges of the Victorian Premier’s Prize for First Fiction, of not giving the award to a young writer who has perpetrated one of the greatest frauds in Australia’s rich history of literary hoaxes and deceptions. Before she was exposed, Helen Demidenko, as she styled herself (Helen Darville as she in fact is), might have seemed to be one of the ...”