“... I don’t handle divorce business.’ In general, scholarly investigators should follow Philip Marlowe’s rule. One feels degraded when Dickens’s private letters are subjected to infra-red photographic analysis (as they were in the 1950s). Beneath the crossings-out are references to Ellen Ternan, his mistress – or perhaps not his mistress ...”

“... Imagism comes in too. He looks at a landscape with half-closed eyes through a mist, or in a Claude-glass, or upside down from between his legs; and this is not a good way to read a novel, which is usually better read as if it were a history. Also it is rather unfair to take the chief examples from the Gospels, because there many readers have an extra ...”

“... Instead, Buckingham became one of James’s cupbearers. He stood at James’s elbow, kept his glass topped up with wine and bent his ear close to hear him talk. James drank and talked a lot at mealtimes. Buckingham was, as the balladeers soon had it, Ganymede to James’s Jove.By the time Buckingham arrived at court, James’s relationship with ...”

“... I am cheeriest Crawling around on all fours eating gentle grass And pretending I am eating broken glass. Then I throw up the pasture. Both Plath and Lowell practised something like this detonation of historical pain in the service of intense and unseemly self-regard, and both were attacked for it. Like them, Seidel has anticipated his detractors. He is only ...”

“... Derbyshire – the maven of early electronica – and others, and which features Tonks’s cut-glass accent enunciating over warblings from another world. One of the poems included in the montage is ‘Orpheus in Soho’, in which she imagines the hero roaming ‘an underworld … hastily constructed,/With bitch-clubs, with cellars and ...”

“... And hence the phenomenon of the Royal Joke during which people fall about in near-hysteria when Philip or Charles say something like: ‘If it rains today we could all get wet!’ People then queue up to tell the TV camera about ‘the Prince’s wonderful sense of humour’. More lies, always more lies. The cultural compulsion is truly strong. I was once ...”

“... It’s like being in a tunnel. Finally I emerge onto the brilliance of the quai, beneath a roof of glass panels which seems to magnify the light. In a short space the time-focus tightens from season to the days of the Parisian rentrée, to a moment in the life of the narrator. The sentence ‘The station is very crowded’ acts as a hinge, referring back to ...”

“... The number of titles mentioned in contemporary documents – the account books of the impresario Philip Henslowe, the registers of the Stationers’ Company, and so on – far exceeds the number of plays now extant as texts. Many never made it into print. Some did and have since perished: booksellers sold their wares unbound, and plays were often considered ...”

“... their game. No one was interested enough to go out and take a closer look. One man, indicating his glass of whisky, turned to a bystander and suggested he run along the deck to see if any stray pieces of ice had come on board. Elizabeth Eustis and Martha Eustis Stevenson, sisters from Haverford, Pennsylvania, travelling first-class, were asleep in their ...”

“... active sort, starting when, again for no particular reason, Obbe drowns his hamster in a water glass (‘It’s only a few seconds before he starts to float like a grey air bubble in a spirit level’). The animal is called Tiesey, which was also Matthies’s nickname. Dad tells the children that they shouldn’t let a large rabbit mate with a small ...”

“... would inherit the townhouse in Bruges. These shrewd operators gathered around the flash and clever Philip, Duke of Burgundy, who was quashing a tradespeople’s revolt in Ghent the year the altarpiece was installed. Despite this, it seems to have been an environment in which artistry and erudition were brought to the fore, and violence and machismo kept ...”

“... Desperate Characters is ‘obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow’. My own reservations lie not with the superlatives, but with the implicit grounds for comparison. If Fox is, in Franzen’s phrase, ‘inarguably great’ – and I believe she is – it isn’t because, for example, she does a ...”

“... kind of novel – a kind which received convincing definition with Excellent Woman (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958). Beside their sureness, and lightness, of touch, the other fragments accompanying Civil to Strangers look fumbling and will be of interest to enthusiasts only. ‘Home Front Novel’ records some period detail about the impact of ...”

“... of the head, cropped hair and a tight-lipped, sly smile. She sits in front of an empty plate and a glass of white wine, and is wielding what looks like a butter knife. Semyon is mostly bald and has a greying goatee. His eyelids weigh heavy, which makes him look a little angry, or maybe just tired. His cutlery is untouched, and his arms are hidden under the ...”

“... and deadly serious purposes. The narrator has parallels with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Philip Roth’s Alex Portnoy (both inheritors of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man). The accident on the set of the war movie alludes to Invisible Man, and the arrogant, racist Auteur takes the place of the white man who lands Ellison’s narrator in hospital. (I ...”