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“... chap, but he did not volunteer.’ Nearly every bit of this vocabulary is foreign to the world of Carol Lake, which contains no balls, no volunteers and few workmen. Like Ursula Wyndham, Carol Lake is a single woman – no spinster – who is detached from but committed to the community in which she was brought ...”

“... a stunned, Janet-and-John quality. But the restaurant served only beer and wine, so they left. Carol did not stop anywhere for her drink as they drove back towards New York. Carol asked her if she wanted to go home or come out to Carol’s house for a while, and Therese said to ...”

“... Syndrome, brought on while he was shaving in an aircraft flying through a thunderstorm. Even Carol Shields’s The Republic of Love, by far the most mundane of these novels, starts off with a sentence that could easily have graced a Science Fiction magazine: ‘As a baby, Tom Avery had 27 mothers’. ‘It was the idea of the bodiless head which appealed ...”

“... Is Joyce Carol Oates​ a hack? For the best part of her six-decade career, there’s been a lingering suspicion that nobody who publishes as often as she does can have much worth saying. An aura of cheapness, or promiscuity, hangs over her work. Literary value is often synonymous with scarcity, and Oates has never made herself scarce ...”

“... Joyce Carol Oates is fascinated by the seedy corners of American life. Her recent novels are narrated by orphans, mutilated girls, the abused, the impoverished, celebrities destroyed by fame, children from families destroyed by rape. Oates’s books often open with a riddling exposition which implies a hidden trauma ...”

“... South Africa House. Joseph Shabalala and Ladysmith Black Mambazo have been signed up by Heinz to carol ‘Inkanyezi Nezazi’ in an advertisment showing blond children eating tomato soup. In Britain we are occasionally treated to a television documentary or news headline about the spread of Aids among South Africa’s black population, the decline in the ...”

“... that if the French or British fleet fell into Hitler’s hands the Atlantic would become a German lake. Roosevelt talked of the new age of air-power. What if the Nazis established themselves in Fascist states in South America, within a few hours’ bombing time of Washington DC? America’s own Air Force was negligible; its antiquated fleet was based mostly ...”

“... to learn that the most important single event of my childhood was the death of my young sister, Carol. Without the least suspicion, I had lived, worked and loved in the shadow of her death. Its hold upon me had been as complete as it was unsuspected. Certainly, when I wrote the novel my drowned sister never entered my head. But all those marshes and ...”

“... and rights holder, but in March 2014 Bate learned that the Hughes Estate, run by his widow, Carol, was withdrawing its co-operation. So he had to find a new publisher, and his right to quote Hughes’s own words was severely curtailed, resulting in long passages of paraphrase that one senses have been carefully scrutinised by legal counsel. This ...”

“... especially when the subject is a woman. In a review of a book about Jean Stafford in 1988, Joyce Carol Oates declared her disgust with ‘pathography’, a narrative focused on dysfunction, breakdown, addiction and disaster, rather than on the mysterious process whereby artists spin their dirty straw into gold. Writing about the Sylvia Plath industry in The ...”

“... of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed underfoot, all the way back to Essex, through Dumfriesshire, Northumberland or Sussex. Later I would continue on my way to ...”

“... died of a post-partum infection; Irma was permanently confined in an insane asylum; Carol, the only son, committed suicide); the exhaustion of Elinor, whose heart gave out in her sixties after many changes of dwelling and ten pregnancies – the last when she was 52; the final years of public fame, culminating in Frost’s reading of ‘The Gift ...”

“... council; though I can’t believe that the ensuite bathroom, where the bidet has a jet resembling Lake Geneva’s, is as it was in her day. A small dinner party – all I could manage – huddled at one end of the 30-foot dining-table. Lady Astor did not have a good press in my family. My father had served in North Africa and Italy with the Eighth Army, which ...”

“... de I’Almanach de Gotha 1998. From these pages I learn that Michael or Mihai was born to King Carol in 1921 and ‘reigned, firstly’, from 1927 to 1930, or in other words between the ages of six and nine. He was then made Crown Prince and Grand Voivode of Alba Julia, before becoming sovereign again between 1940 and 1947. He now lives in Switzerland. He ...”

“... a ‘loy’ is an Irish spade. And so on. The ‘jeddo’ turns out to be the jet d’eau in the lake at Geneva. Meanwhile the verses bearing these novelties rattle like unsprung carts over ruts. Wheat dust ‘skinks and twindles’, sledges ‘skitter and slip’. ‘There was heard the plockplock of horsehooves/a toltering bustle clipped scatter/like ...”