“... paying back my respect to the idea of the comic now. We try our best. Wonderful quote from Henry James that I’m working on at the moment: ‘We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. The rest is the madness of art.’AS: How are you working on that quote now?TP: Mucking about with it. Making a film. Writing music. It writes ...”

“... chapter to the ways in which the plays of the period – such as the anonymous comedy George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the ...”

“... fiction. A number of facts may be checked. It is a fact, as Peterley writes, that in 1937 Graham Greene was chosen to edit an English imitation of the New Yorker called Night and Day, and it is a percipient comment, in view of the coming success of Horizon and the brief existence of Night and Day, that Cyril Connolly’s talent might have better fitted him ...”

“... Henry James writes of a very grand lady that she had ‘an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage’. Paradoxically, the same would be true of the literary personality of Elias Canetti. Behind its approachable modesty, its avoidance of every publicity and image-making process, there is a loftiness, an assurance, a stance of absolute superiority ...”

“... almost everyone had access to a radio, though not in the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall and St James, where they were banned, or in the Palace of Westminster, where MPs needed to gather around an MP’s car parked outside if they wanted to hear a horse race or a cup tie. Under the Presbyterian influence of its first director general, Lord Reith, until 1938 ...”

“... devious and supposedly a good chap, Philby has never appealed to me any more than Graham Greene does, who was his friend and admirer. It’s ironical that even after his departure for Moscow Philby was always more sympathetically treated by journalists because he was a journalist himself, supposedly a good sort and of course he wasn’t ...”

“... Loach, who joined the BBC as a trainee director in 1963, and Tony Garnett, who had been hired by James MacTaggart, producer of the Wednesday Play series, as a story editor and talent scout. Taking advantage of MacTaggart being on holiday, Garnett put sufficient resources into the project to ensure that it would be too expensive to cancel by the time he got ...”

“... time he had sufficient reputation in the London playhouses to earn that bitter satirical salvo in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit. The pamphlet was presented as the deathbed scribblings of Robert Greene, but is nowadays attributed to its ostensible ‘editor’, Henry Chettle. It scoffingly refers to him as ...”

“... It is in their judgments that you will first find the tests of lawful decision-making which Lord Greene later summarised in the much-cited Wednesbury case, a decision which introduced no new doctrine of law and of which the outcome (upholding a highly questionable ban on children going to the cinema on Sundays) exemplifies the state of torpor into which ...”

“... streets of Cinco de Mayo and Francisco Madero: quieter, more humdrum. It was like this when Graham Greene passed through in the 1930s, the street ‘where you can buy your clothes cheaper if you don’t care much for appearances’.In mid-January, Loy arrived in Mexico City, and there they were married on 25 January 1918. ‘We left the town hall, walking with ...”

“... Although Faith Healer did not win critical acclaim when it was first performed in New York with James Mason as Frank Hardy, a later production in Dublin with Donal McCann in the part made clear that Friel had created one of the most subtle and memorable male characters in Irish writing. But it was his play Translations, first performed in 1980, which seems ...”

“... expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a ...”

“... the allotted Uncle Tom role. This is why a young black woman identified with Marilyn Monroe. James Baldwin identified with her too, as he told Weatherby when he was introduced to him by Tennessee Williams. Not that Weatherby was the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of what might seem like odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s ...”

“... came into his own as an undergraduate, writing his senior thesis on André Gide and Graham Greene under the supervision of R.P. Blackmur, while continuing his piano studies with Erich Itor Kahn, a European Jewish émigré. His parents expected him to join the family business after graduation, but he had no intention of becoming his father’s ...”

“... Crockatt and Powell on Lower Marsh, a street opposite The Cut near the Old Vic, where I buy Henry James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master’. It’s a short story in which Henry St George, a famous novelist, supposedly Daudet but resembling James himself, gives the benefit of his experience to a young writer, Paul Overt. St ...”