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“... their relationship to the business of writing; it was also about the ‘chip of ice’ that Graham Greene said exists in every writer’s heart. This chip is often talked about – and mentions of it on the part of writers are usually either a form of boasting or a plea for special treatment – but it isn’t often made to seem real. The achievement of My ...”

“... brilliant comedians. The most brilliant thing I saw, better than music hall, was The Life of Brian. Also done by friends of mine. Terry Jones is a very close friend. I’ve played ping-pong with every one of Pythons, except the one who died.GP: You’ve played ping-pong with every famous person.AS: Are you more forehand or backhand in ping-pong?TP: I ...”

“... proceeded to invent a fictional cast of sub-agents under his control. Graham Greene could not have improved on it: there was a Gibraltarian waiter, 100 per cent loyal to the German cause; a Welsh nationalist; a violently anti-Russian South African who was also a first-class linguist with contacts in the Ministry of Information. All this ...”

“... magazine’s early demise was due solely to the libel suit brought by Shirley Temple after Graham Greene, the magazine’s cinema reviewer, suggested that she knowingly flaunted her precocious sexuality. It would be nice to think that the asinine law put the magazine out of business. But it put itself out of business. Under-capitalised from the start, it was ...”

“... Waiting in the wings is a book by him about Ursula, entitled Style, which, according to Graham Greene, who was sent the manuscript, might be edited for publication. There may be a cult in the making – and one could imagine a film by Antonioni, whose scriptwriter, Mark Peploe, was intrigued by J. Behrens in his last days. Ursula’s life resembles John ...”

“... States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day in July’ – a covert imputation and ...”

“... The Darwin scholar, John Greene, once summarised the Darwinian revolution as the triumph of a dynamic and non-teleological structuring of nature over static, teological systems: the triumph of chance and change over design and permanence, the triumph of objectivity in the life sciences, of secularism and naturalism over clericalism and the supernatural ...”

“... According to Gary Taylor he was ‘one of the finest editors of the last three centuries’, while Brian Vickers accounts him ‘the best all-round editor of Shakespeare in this period or any other’. In Shakespeare Restored, Theobald set out his stall as a new kind of editor – scholarly, specialist, always ready to grapple with the textual corruptions ...”

“... true even of Irene. In the fiction, the political interest is primarily concerned, as Donald Greene said in his book on Johnson’s politics, ‘with the problems of psychology and morality that underlie political attitudes rather than with political questions themselves’. When Nekayah says ‘all natural and almost all political evils, are incident ...”

“... in a novel without making a dog’s dinner out of the book? Some people, such as Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Chinua Achebe, Georges Bernanos, Kate O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger ...”