“... all do more or less – we hardly feel disposed to say that we should never have suspected it. We may even wonder whether his colleagues might not agree that his ‘ill-humour is all-besetting’, though it is part of the reticence of the journal that we hear little of his displays of it. He is ‘a dissident’, he says, because he does not ‘love all ...”

“... dimension is, to a greater or lesser extent, almost always there. On the surface his novels may be about uncovering a German spy ring, circumventing a worldwide conspiracy, or freeing a rich Danish recluse from blackmailers, but beyond this they are voyages of self-discovery, quests for self-knowledge, searchings for one’s soul, ending in regeneration ...”

“... a double act. Yet, as Conrad observes in Heart of Darkness, we die as we dream, alone. The thought may have occurred to the comedian-novelist that at death’s door he wasn’t, for once, dancing off into the blue with his little hairy-legged friend. That there are other provocative links between Eric and Sid is strongly suggested by various tricks in the ...”

“... I am already saying ‘I got six clams in the river and some weat six feet tall.’ The spelling may be out but the facts are there. Nobody can teach you this. You know what made me laugh? The fight with Wallace Stevens. Baker’s Life of Me did not say much about this because Baker did not know but there was a letter I wrote to Sara Murphy that gives the ...”

“... is nonetheless a comic triumph, full of terrific jokes and brilliantly sustained set-pieces. Clive may not have managed to sweet-talk Millicent and Pandora into sharing his paper bag, but that was long ago. He ought to try them again, because his pitch – it seems to me – is getting close to sounding ...”

“... pigs under control or understand the principles of house maintenance. (Similar conclusions, we may remember, were proclaimed during the last century in the pages of Punch.) Murder and mutilation are not alien to them (did she ever imagine they were?). Their behaviour at the dinner table is unengaging. This literary girl, very strangely, blames James Joyce ...”

“... sits alongside a railway track, usually has some sort of trellis with ivy and bougainvillaea.I may seem to be making a big fuss about a small point, but this sort of idle condescension ambles through the book: when one of the crew suffers a (recurring) kidney attack, Mr Golding kindly suggests that he should be put ‘on a train for Cairo, where we would ...”

“... political refugees. Of the Germans, many were businessmen, artists, musicians and scholars. They may have had a political preference for liberal England, especially if they were Jews, which many of them were: but if they did settle here, it was from choice, not necessity. A few straddled the professional/exile divide, like Friedrich Engels who came to ...”

“... been seized by other means. But Ratushinskaya knows quite well that nothing can be done, and that may be why the authorities particularly fear her sort. With a counterrevolutionary, or a new sort of revolutionary, you know where you are, but the KGB could only find her guilty of ‘an unenthusiastic way of thinking’. A splendid phrase that tells much, but ...”

“... most of which give the impression of having been phoned-in the night before publication. There may be another truth about the modern literary life in all this. A number of Stern’s miscellaneities reflect on his frequent writer’s trips abroad and in one of them he observes: ‘African life does not allow for the luxurious development of a novel; only ...”

“... the streets with a truncheon. Some of those who think of him as a perdurable pillar of the Left may be surprised by his crusty middle-class attitude to the cult of scruffiness, the wanton misuse of the English language, the vileness of the Cockney tongue (which ruled out his first adolescent girlfriend) and his hankering for a world in which every ...”

“... finding, in 1953, that the transfer of a Chinese philosophic-poetic concept into English ‘may very probably be the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos’ would now strike one as hyperbolic but plausible. St Jerome is again claiming his place as patron of letters. The sources of this change are various; and engage the ...”

“... theoretical quest through Leviticus and the Gospels, Mary Douglas, Freud and Winnicott. It may be optimistic to expect a corresponding virtuosity from the British reader. But can we join in the debate at any other ...”

“... style tells heavily against him here. That neither Ruth nor her husband come across as real people may be ascribed to a simple lack of literary skill, but when Schatzman describes Ruth as having a dream in which she tells him that her anger ‘is like a great big ball of fire’, in which she asks her husband, ‘Could you love me when I’m full of hate and ...”

“... of generalised abstraction. His life ended in suicide in 1954. It is to be hoped that there may be additions to Mr Hodges’s splendid book by some of his close friends mentioned here. I do not believe, on the evidence provided, all that Mr Hodges writes towards the end of the book, when he represents Anglo-American security precautions after the war as ...”