“... I just can’t see it. She’s elegant, composed, straight-backed. She’s in a tweedy suit on the beach, scowling at the sun, one hand in pocket, the other holding sunglasses, as if about to make some school-ma’amish point. She’s neat, both modern and quintessentially luxurious; dark hair pulled back into a bun, eyes like soft triangles, sweeping ...”

“... been made for his work. Fante has been compared to Dostoevsky, Knut Hamsun, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Steinbeck, James Farrell, William Saroyan and Nathanael West. In 1977, a Washington Post reviewer compared The Brotherhood of the Grape to The Brothers Karamazov and King Lear. Hyperbole aside, both Fante’s early novels are excellent ...”

“... him to establish his Weekly in the dark days of the Republican Fifties. Stone has always revered Thomas Jefferson, and espoused a leftish liberalism intended to recall America to her mission as the best hope of the common man rather than the conservative super-power she has too often become. At the same time, he has preached the need to marry Marx and ...”

“... of something else.’ So it’s rather a blow to Barney to discover he’s a reincarnation of Thomas Hardy. The discovery comes about at a séance organised by Sharon in her bookshop, where, under the influence of a hypnotist, Barney finds himself recounting, in the first person, Hardy’s memory of watching the hanging of Martha Brown at Dorchester when ...”

“... diction (‘Get the picture?’), the salt of his favourite insults (‘White trash’, ‘Palm Beach trash’). I heard him say it: ‘Me at my absolute worst’.‘I never quite know what I’m doing when I write a novel,’ Didion said in an interview soon after A Book of Common Prayer was published. What she had done was to build a book on a mother’s ...”

“... Thomas Hardy once told Robert Graves how he had gone to the Oxford English Dictionary to confirm the existence of a dialect word he proposed to use in a poem, and came to a standstill because the only authority quoted for it was his own Under the Greenwood Tree. This is an acute case of our dependence on dictionaries, and illustrates the commonest reason for resorting to them ...”

“... book on Some Religious Elements in English Literature and a biography of Milton. Like her ancestor Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose History of England was intended to appeal to the common reader (and particularly to women), she disliked intellectual snobbery. In ‘Parties’ she surveys the foibles of the literary world represented at a gathering: the ...”

“... nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist topography. The short haul, down the ...”

“... he flew to the Bahamas, despite having only a fraction of an $89 tax refund left to spend. On the beach he met a blonde, Neilia Hunter, who picked up the tab for hamburgers for two and got him into a club for free because a friend of hers was dating the owner. (‘I fell ass over tin cup in love – at first sight. And she was so easy to talk to.’) By the ...”

“... for all the mint tea in Araby! Williams made his poet pervert die cannibalised on a Mediterranean beach. A film of the same summerish title and along similar lines, but in which the star was a Venus flytrap, was shot in Mexico and exhibited in the late Fifties but is now screened only in the late late shows. Unnaturally, the Mediterranean youth became riotous ...”

“... painful shape in By Grand Central Station. It was an idiom of the time, mostly invented by Dylan Thomas, whose voice is heard in lines like ‘My pig-faced kingdom with tongues of wrong’, but exploited by George Barker as a continuous rhetoric. Some of Thomas’s poems eclipse and perfect the manner, rise above it into ...”

“... dinner? The Geertzes spent a ‘strange and beautiful’ evening with Mead and her friend on Sanur beach, while other Westerners evacuated Bali ahead of Sukarno’s nationalisation of the island. Geertz’s scholarship lent an aura of expertise to US imperial projects in the 1960s. Mead was a public moralist who advocated a save-the-world kind of anthropology ...”

“... his own lyric touches that echo the master’s prose. One chapter begins: ‘Dogs running on the beach and barking in the sunlight. Sand. Water.’ (Bow. Wow.) But for the most part Kaplan meets the challenge of Vidal’s cagey wit by bearing down even harder, giving him the full Leon Edel-Matthew Bruccoli filing-cabinet treatment. For years Vidal has made ...”

“... the Interregnum in 1660, Pericles was the first Shakespeare play to be performed, with a youthful Thomas Betterton, aged 25, celebrated in the title role at the Phoenix in Drury Lane. In fact Pericles was more than simply popular: the play became a byword for audience appeal and recognition. In The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (c.1613-14), Robert Taylor ...”

“... the music of the Act Two encounter is a thrillingly unequivocal rendering of an ideal copulation. (Thomas Mann was not wrong when he spoke of the opera’s ‘lascivious desire for bed’.) But Act Three makes it clear that the eroticism is more means than end, a platform for the propaganda against lucidity; that the deepest subject is the surrender of ...”