“... 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 ...”

“... George Michael​ died at the age of 53 on Christmas Day 2016; despite his success, it was hard not to think of what might have been. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on 25 June 1963 in East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison ...”

“... a long day. What are you drinking? This kind of thing can be a little tiring when it’s done straight, and at length, and in his critical notes and autobiographical essays Mamet certainly tries too hard for the wise and pithy effect. He’s always interesting, but he’s also busy being smart, and he’s hooked on the myth of the American writer as ...”

“... of the Red Army, A.A. Ignat’ev. On the cover there is a photograph of Uncle Alyosha sitting straight-backed, legs akimbo, red stars on his collar, his black boots glistening, his hands folded over a sword resting on his knee. He holds his chin stiffly erect and he has exactly the same thin amused smile, the same superbly assured carriage as in the ...”

“... process went on, often in very different ways, through the following centuries. In time there came straight fiction. The best of the Dürer novels is Ludwig Tieck’s unfinished The Wanderings of Franz Sternbald: A Story of Old Germany, published in 1798. Its underlying theme is tension between simplicity and complexity again, art and morality, and some other ...”

“... knowingly, so unanxiously embraced – as legend. The characters and the settings of the film come straight from the Ellroy novel, the third in a group he calls the LA Quartet. The others are The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere and White Jazz. The plot of the novel has been compressed and slightly switched for the film, bits of dialogue and the occasional death ...”

“... served by our own most recent literary hoax. I have before me a press hand-out from the firm of Michael Joseph: WE BELIEVE THAT NEVER BEFORE HAS A CELEBRATED WRITER OF FICTION SO SUCCESSFULLY DISGUISED HER IDENTITY AND CREATED SUCH AN EXPERIMENT IN PUBLISHING AND NEVER BEFORE HAS A WRITER AT THE HEIGHT OF HER POWERS WRITTEN TWO SUCH POWERFUL AND MOVING ...”

“... sentences’, and that ‘no one thought Mrs Trilling heaves into my thoughts lands straight.’ But for her the students had not simply taken over a large university, they had stormed the house of reason, desecrated some noble, elective family of the mind. ‘I admit a possible bias,’ she says. ‘One marries into a university much as one ...”

“... and salvific cults, syncretic borrowings from the Indus to the Atlantic. Sidebottom takes us straight to the most apt comparison: only a few years after Heliogabalus’ death, a young man in Mesopotamia documented the visions that terrified him even as they convinced him of his mission to reveal the stark realities of a world of evil matter and good ...”

“... moment, represents the voice of ‘youth’ is peculiar enough. REM’s lead singer and lyricist, Michael Stipe, is knocking on 40; other members of the group are older (one, the percussionist Bill Berry, has taken early retirement, on grounds of advanced age and poor health). Stipe is as close in age to Roger Scruton as to Liam Gallagher and, on photographic ...”

“... sixty. A few passers-by watch the arrival of the celebrities, of which there seem to be only two, Michael Yorke and Michael Caine (who later slags off the film). The audience is not star-studded either and heavily sprinkled with those freaks, autograph-hunters and emotional cripples who haunt the stage-doors of American ...”

“... him).Brando was right, judging by the 2004 movie version of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford. The film itself is a pedestrian and pretty adaptation that can’t quite decide where it stands on the antisemitism of the main characters, but Pacino is an excellent Shylock, emphasising the character’s furious dignity in the face of ...”

“... the biggest takings in their history.’ My indecision is final is a perfect title, taking us straight into the language of Sam Goldwyn (‘Include me out’). It also conveys very neatly the flavour of much movie talk, at once emphatic and illusory. The book is (innocently) full of cherishable ...”