“... Le Page was completed shortly before his death, dedicated and its copyright made over to a young couple who had befriended him; it was they who secured its posthumous publication, when, after numerous rejections all round London, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, to his enormous credit, acquired it for Hamish Hamilton, who published it, with Fowles’s ...”

“... a miniature newscaster. ‘They died instantly.’ Cushla Lavery, the class’s teacher and the young Catholic protagonist of Trespasses, Louise Kennedy’s first novel, hates the ritual of The News and the specialist vocabulary it inculcates. ‘Rubber bullets. Saracen. Internment. The Special Powers Act.’ But the headmaster refuses to drop it, on the ...”

“... being told throughout the film intersect rapidly, and no easy solution or reflection results. A young man walks into a newspaper office in Weymouth and hands over a school photograph, pointing out one boy. A Spitfire prepares to land on a French beach, gliding, its propeller still, because it has run out of fuel. A rescued soldier in a stopped train near ...”

“... is happening here, and what sort of film is this? Let’s start with those first few minutes. A young woman stares at us, or rather slightly away from us, perhaps at someone offscreen. She has a smooth oval face, large eyes, a mildly sulky gaze, she’s not revealing any secrets. She’s very young, more a girl than a ...”

“... don’t recall anyone calling her anything in the film; in the credits she is ‘Elle’) and her young son (the credits just call him ‘le fils’) arrive, settle down, share glances, fidget and leave. Miller’s book’s main argument, it seems, is that we should dispense with the fetishism of originality and accept that a copy can be just as valuable, or ...”

“... the new hub of gay life after Stonewall. One night at the International Stud he ran into the young August Kleinzahler – out on a bar crawl with his gay older brother – who later described him as ‘a tall, handsome-looking galoot in a T-shirt and leather vest, with lurid tattoos on his arms. He didn’t look like any sort of poet to me, more like a ...”

“... the place of justice came punishment by the Commandos, who sought out and murdered leaders of the Young Turks in Germany in 1921-22. The aim of the Commandos – and this was Caesese’s point – was not primarily revenge. Their most famous member, Soghomon Tehlirian, surrendered voluntarily to the police, hoping that a public trial would make the world more ...”

“... arse. (For the record, Cruise was born in 1962.) Val Kilmer also returns, but he doesn’t look so young. His character is dying (Kilmer has had a long struggle with throat cancer), and he looks like the faded memory of what used to be a film star. Pete has been busy not getting promoted, either by design or as a result of certain persistent character ...”

“... has been central to debates about the relations between intellectuals and the state since before young Werther got sorrowful; possibly ever since the play was adapted as Der bestrafte Brudermord soon after its first appearance. Certainly once Shakespeare was naturalised by the Schlegel-Tieck translation and others in the early 1800s as ‘the third German ...”

“... by that rickety wood. I’d seen it before, in that frame, and I knew who it was: my grandfather Michael. I knew that’s who it was though I’d never met him. The grandfather was covered in dust and damp patches dried in. But that was him: he had the darkest eyes I’d ever seen. His hair was slick, combed up to a glistening ridge; the lips were thin, the ...”

“... is an account of a love affair between – here goes – a first-person narrator and an unnamed young man. The narrator presents herself as a university teacher and a translator, just like the author. The young man is a student at the university where she teaches, or rather taught at the time, somewhere on the West Coast ...”

“... beneath their uniforms.’ The Institute had ‘live exhibits’. André Gide was shown one: ‘a young man who opened his shirt with a modest smile to display two perfectly formed female breasts’. Hirschfeld, with ‘his doggy moustache, thick peering spectacles and clumsy German-Jewish boots’, was a scientific hero for homosexuals. His communist ...”

“... in the shape of Jane Greer, may also really care for the man she is framing and using, a very young Robert Mitchum. This complexity is not going to do her any good, because both the plot and Mitchum believe in the simpler story of her murderous guile. But we are left wondering if there isn’t some sort of baffled innocence lurking in her evildoings. The ...”

“... And beer. I am one of the only guys in his thirties. Most are under 25, or over 40. Many of the young guys have kids. One of the guys has hidden a small joint on him. He threatens to smoke it. In the cell opposite us (rumour has it that the felons are in that cell) an older man in a porkpie hat has been talking for hours, non-stop, to no one in ...”

“... I could have had more), from Eshleman, from H.R. Hays, from Ed Dorn and Gordon Brotherston, from Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi, from Margaret Sayers Peden and now from Margaret Jull Costa. None is the English Vallejo. What frustrates their enterprise is an inability to decide what matters and what doesn’t. They end up not seeing the wood for the ...”