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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... how a shower of rain Had stopped so cleanly across Golightly’s lane It might have been a wall of glass That had toppled over. He stood there for ages To wonder which side, if any, he should be on. The point of the poem seems to reside in the last line: but anyone familiar with Muldoon’s work will take a closet look at ‘Golightly’s lane’, and perhaps ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Germany. As he knew some French and German, Hecht was asked to interview the survivors. He told Philip Hoy, who has edited his Collected Poems (Knopf, £42), that ‘the place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after, I would wake shrieking.’ He also saw his own men machine-gun a group of German women and ...”

“... you have new shoes that are too tight, or a table-top bleached by a hot dish or the wet rim of a glass, you might want to try the Pittagora family’s remedies. Marina Warner acknowledges the help of the Getty Centre in California, which is not known for its patronage of novelists. David Lodge, meanwhile, has been touring the Birmingham factories. Nice Work ...”

“... Of Philip Larkin’s​ many ostentatiously ‘less deceived’ accounts of family life, among my favourites is the soaring riff that concludes his introduction to All What Jazz (1970), a collection of mainly unimpressed reviews of John Coltrane, Miles Davis et al that initially appeared in the Telegraph. ‘Sometimes I imagine them,’ he muses of the readers of his monthly column,sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year-old detached houses among the golf courses of Outer London, husbands of ageing and bitter wives they first seduced to Artie Shaw’s ‘Begin the Beguine’ or the Squadronaires’ ‘The Nearness of You’; fathers of cold-eyed lascivious daughters on the pill … and cannabis-smoking jeans-and-bearded Stuart-haired sons whose oriental contempt for ‘bread’ is equalled only by their insatiable demand for it… men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet ...”

“... on a train to St Pancras to deliver, to his sovereign, the unique bloom of a lily, enclosed in a glass bubble. The man is a harbinger of death, showing how the bloom in its misty bubble is dead as a stone, how the beat of my heart in time with his journey is steadily slower. Other poems recall the mother in a hospital bed, fed with oxygen through a tube in ...”

“... taken to an eyeglass, after reading the case of a Major Parkinson who cut his throat with a bit of glass in a Holloway cell. Max’s was a tough, unsentimental world, but could combine both feeling and elegance with toughness. If Max really was leading a double life – a pleasurable but hardly tenable hypothesis – he concealed it well, spending a lot of ...”

“... and make your Holocaust victim an unusual souvenir of a memorable Sunday afternoon? Or maybe, as Philip Gourevitch observed, just throw it away as you leave the show? After all, the museum Holocaust experience always comes to an end, and your victim can easily be dumped with the trash when you’re safely back in the sunshine – a neat replay of ...”

“... practises, seems to occupy a smaller and smaller cultural space. Apart from the superstars like Philip Roth or Toni Morrison, literary writers in America are accorded a social status roughly equivalent to that of artisanal potters producing, like them, lovely, unnecessary work that hardly anyone cares enough about to want. (That’s the kind of writer ...”