“... from which we break out at our peril. Childhood may be relatively happy – it offers, as the young narrator Marcus tells us in Indignation, ‘unimperilled, unchanging days when everybody felt safe and settled in his place’ – but as soon as the sex instinct kicks in, parental protectiveness turns into restriction. As Marcus ventures away from ...”

“... here and how might an author guard against its perils? Few writers are as well qualified as David Lodge both to diagnose and to overcome these potential difficulties. One of the leading critics and literary theorists of the past few decades, he has interested himself above all in the mechanics of narration: both the nuts and bolts of expository ...”

“... if so, in what way? There could be no better place to look for answers to these questions than in David Attwell’s J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing. Attwell is an ex-student of Coetzee’s who has already written in defence of his work in J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. He now returns to his subject with the advantage of the ...”

“... Hendrix noted in his diary after their first, brief meeting. ‘She just knocked me on my ass,’ David Crosby said after hearing her sing ‘Both Sides, Now’. ‘It was the highest quality of songwriting. I liked her better than Dylan.’ Crosby briefly became Mitchell’s inamorato and produced her first album. Leonard Cohen, another influential early ...”

“... a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country house where some amateurs are rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This house seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that ...”

“... Marxism​ is still very young, almost in its infancy,’ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1957, more than seventy years after Karl Marx’s death. Sartre had first read Marx three decades earlier when he, too, was still very young. At the time, the author of Capital had seemed a figure of merely historical interest ...”

“... or just slow things down (‘chain clogs leg’). Samantha Cameron should be warned that ‘David Cameron’ is an anagram of ‘adman divorce’, and we should all be wary of a politician whose name contains ‘random advice’. A really good anagram gives a similar sort of aesthetic pleasure to a perfectly appropriate fictional name. It seems like ...”

“... of always being cold.The burden of these illnesses is hard to overstate. At a time when even young children were expected to help support the family, the birth of a cretin could be a catastrophe. Through it all, there was the fear of what a birth might bring; the fear that it was their fault. This was an ancient evil, noted by Vitruvius and Pliny the ...”

“... early death at the age of 44. As a boy playing on Berkhamsted Common, Greene had cast himself as David Balfour, and as a novelist he can be thought to have given his own bleak twist to the kind of ‘adventure story’ with which Stevenson’s name was for so long associated. In 1949 he began to write a biography of Stevenson, abandoning it only when he ...”

“... His early forays into fiction, particularly Moi, un noir (1957), about the life of young migrants from Niger in Abidjan, had a formative influence on the leading figures of the Nouvelle Vague such as Truffaut and Godard. In 1960, he himself conducted Chronicle of a Summer, an investigation into the ‘Parisian tribe’, along with the ...”

“... Italian opera). Danon is an accountant and an ageing widower. His wife Nadia, once the beautiful young girl, has died of cancer. Their son, David-Rico, has taken off to India-Nepal-Thailand, as all young Israelis do, if you believe the fuss, as Oz seems to, about ‘migration’ in the ...”

“... not at all like Swann and even less like Proust himself. A literary parallel would be Stendhal’s young hero Lucien Leuwen, though it would be difficult to imagine him transposed into the English social scene. Duff Cooper had the same great capacity for enjoying life, which is not uncommon: much less common was his ability to do so in such a way that the ...”

“... David Peace’s first novel, Nineteen Seventy Four (1999), was set in West Yorkshire in the year of its title, and presented that time and place in apocalyptic terms. ‘These are violent bloody times, son,’ a senior policeman tells the narrator, a gauche young journalist investigating the disappearance of a series of girls ...”

“... a highly readable and scrupulously accurate account of Marlowe’s life in its historical context, David Riggs’s The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004), which no new archival discoveries have rendered obsolete.* It is an even bigger difficulty that there is a similarly unsuperseded historically contextualised introduction to Marlowe’s literary ...”

“... used to say. The new version is ‘Zimbabwe is kenge,’ which means roughly the same thing. David Caute’s portrait of white mores is savage, but like so many visitors before and after him, he was fascinated – seduced – by Rhodesia. It was, and is, a country which captivates even as it appals, and it has always been so much easier to explain the ...”