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“... Men in white on ladders Scale the walls, then pose on planks, Staring straight ahead as if they’re peeing; All afternoon hands juggle. Then, bottoms bulging out of overalls, descend, To admire their dizzy handiwork. No wonder Hitler gave this up For something more dazzling: Blond clowns parade or somersault like tanks, Brown flags and bunting flap like bandages, To make the grown-up children Laugh like drains ...”

“... At the seaside dazed by the sun And its tremendous symphony, Strangers are friends. Families Under the cliffs uncover navels, Amorous bumps, far-fetched clefts; And the kids squeal with terror, Their ball kidnapped by a wave. If only at the graveside we could Ungrit our teeth, weeping buckets, Our family might feel Less estranged: drunk on grief And memories of a great-aunt And her long black bathing-costume; Not this cocktail-party chat ...”

“... off-putting model. One readily sees why scrupulous users of English would want to shy from it, as James Greene also does in his translations from Afanasy Fet, which Henry Gifford introduces with a monitory subtext of disengagement: ‘Russian poetry even today keeps the formality of structure, the regular positioning of rhyme, and the canonical ...”

“... J.-B. Pontalis is a Parisian intellectual de pur sang. Born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family, he was brought up in Neuilly, and, as a child, spent long summers at a family house in Cabourg, Proust’s Balbec. He studied philosophy under Sartre, and taught it for some years. He entered psychoanalysis under the aegis of Lacan, and having weaned himself from that unfortunate affiliation, is now one of the leading figures in the French psychoanalytic world ...”

“... die ‘when cruel old campaigners win safe through’. Epitaphs apart, what will survive of Graham Greene? Not love, certainly; nor the famously tortured guerrilla of Roman Catholicism, fighting and writing for and against the Church from inside and outside it, and all the more effective a partisan and publicist on its behalf when he seemed most spectacularly ...”

“... in his expert grip, and to keep meaning under control. They are secrets, not mysteries. Graham Greene and George Orwell may have been closer models for McEwan (I am thinking of the scene in Down and Out in Paris and London, when Orwell, in the doss-house, is woken up ‘by a dim impression of some large brown thing coming towards me. I opened my eyes and ...”

“... reviews. The verse is of a high standard. We see poems that helped establish the reputations of James Fenton and Craig Raine; poems by Heaney and Lowell; and Peter Porter’s ‘An Australian Garden’, which counts among his best things. Of the short stories, ‘Solid Geometry’ is a reminder that TNR played host to Ian McEwan when he was still regarded ...”

“... seem worth recording. There is for me, in other words, a poetry and a prose of dreams. Graham Greene once wrote that for the novelist identification with a character sometimes ‘goes so far that one may dream his dream and not ones’s own’. In my most recently published novel I decided one or other of the central characters should experience or ...”

“... is, nonetheless, a remarkable similarity in technique between, say, Margaret Drabble and Graham Greene. Both create an entirely coherent romance world, powered by variations on self-satisfaction, in Greene’s case masquerading as self-disgust. In both cases this is highly transmissible to the reader. Every decade has its ...”

“... He told his own tale and in the process informed readers – including readers of Conrad, Waugh, Greene and others – that giving another side of the story meant finding another way to tell it. It is not only black British writers who have discovered this: certain Irish and Scottish writers have been insisting on it for years. Adherents of a politics of ...”

“... Entering Mexico at the start of The Lawless Roads, Graham Greene saw among the peasant women of Monterrey the signs of a real religious life about him – ‘the continuous traffic of piety’. One of the most striking things about Samuel Johnson is the depth of his urge towards piety: not spirituality at every moment, but what we might today call ‘mere’ piety ...”

“... her local department store in Bayswater) – is one of several interesting points on which Richard Greene has nothing to say in this disappointingly flat biography. Why she did it she explained herself. It was, like so much in her life and work, the result of a famously (if productively) unhappy childhood. The Sitwells, Edith and her two younger ...”

“... of astrology away from the dubious claims of prediction towards another kind of understanding. Liz Greene’s book The Astrology of Fate expounds an English version of the same process. Liz Greene, it appears, is both an astrologer and an analytical psychologist of a distinctly Jungian cast. The resultant discussion of her ...”

“... was more than outweighed by highly respectable contributions from the likes of Edmund Gosse, Henry James and even John Buchan. Yet many of the illustrations did shock and even revolt, and Lane was to sack Beardsley when the backwash from the Wilde scandal hit the Bodley Head. ‘Wilde!’ wrote Lambert, in one of his few stylistic lapses. ‘The very name is ...”

“... When the American poet Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867) travelled to Europe in 1822 he was carrying letters of introduction to Byron, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Lafayette and Talleyrand, though he never actually met any of them – whether through shyness or negligence or something else is not clear. Dickens called on Halleck on arrival in New York in 1842, but later wrote him off as a mere imitator ...”