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“... Men of different generations and presumably social worlds, Anthony Powell and Craig Raine aren’t much alike as writers. But the novelist’s Miscellaneous Verdicts and the poet’s Haydn and the Valve Trumpet are both very good, solid selections of occasional writing. The five hundred pages to which they both run are mainly literary journalism, with some illuminating essays on the social-historical from Powell, and vivid side-glances at painters and painting from Raine ...”

“... to fix in its final form an idea of Irish eccentricity and chaotic living; as Stella Gibbons is to Mary Webb, so perhaps this author would wish to be considered in relation to a host of ‘Big House’ novelists, chroniclers of monumental disrepair. Gates falling off their hinges and leaking roofs. Plaster from the moulded ceilings on the rotting Aubusson ...”

“... way into the future: in the meantime Faith and her Sindon friend Anne Cambus rifle the life of Mary, Queen of Scots for scenes to play-act in a derelict cottage, while the Battle of Britain rages overhead, and Eden, at her dressing-table, applies cosmetic preparations to her flawless face. All this is set out with the surest feeling for the character of ...”

“... music from a speaker in the corner. The coffin lid propped up against a wall. It said, ‘Elsie Mary Orton, aged 62 years’. Betty said: ‘They’ve got her age wrong, see. Your Mum was 63. You should tell them about that. Put in a complaint.’ I said: ‘Why? It doesn’t matter now.’ ‘Well,’ said Betty, ‘you want it done right, don’t ...”

“... of this discursive complexity. One particularly notorious recent example is Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion.* This book, as its title suggests, pushes the line that rape is a relatively straightforward biological affair, and probably the natural product of evolutionary adaptation within the ...”

“... wondering what Updike made of the more extreme technical violations in, say, Degas’s portrait Mary Cassat with Small Dog (1890), or his 1861 portrait of Princesse Pauline de Metternich, which was done from a still extant photograph. The photograph shows a woman not unlike the late Marghanita Laski, with full lips gathered over a generous helping of ...”

“... Nest Farm near Broadway in Worcestershire, on the northern rim of the Cotswolds. It is farmed by Mary Young and her adult daughter and son. On their premises they sell beef they have grown themselves. Their sixty cows graze among cowslips and cherry trees, living in families even when an elder calf has been weaned, then displaced at the udder by the ...”

“... him and his new house was organised, with the parish choir, the Gaelic League and the Children of Mary out in force. Such exhibitions of Catholic fervour aren’t uncommon. We’re reminded of an episode in Peadar O’Donnell’s novel of 1934, On the Edge of the Stream, when a similar crowd assembles to repudiate in public the message of a socialist ...”

“... in a unique family situation. She was born in 1877 in California, the fourth and last child of Mary Dora Gray and Joseph Charles Duncan, who divorced when she was a baby. Her father was a poet, editor, banker and ladies’ man who made and lost four fortunes and died in a shipwreck. ‘All my childhood,’ she writes, ‘seemed to be under the black shadow ...”

“... explicate the literary associations of the characters’ names. Mr Prince was a minor favourite, Mary Lamb the major one (no one I think mentioned the real Mary Lamb, though the Listener review was headed ‘Lamb’s tale from Amis’). Amy Hide, her alter ego, was quickly linked to Jekyll and Hyde. Auberon Waugh kept ...”

“... is no acknowledgment of the debates over women’s rights, sexuality and reproduction in which Mary Robinson, for example, established her reputation. Indeed, one could read through this whole anthology without ever confronting the idea that sexuality has been a vexatious political issue in Irish history. Even Terence Brown’s introduction to the useful ...”

“... term ‘metaphysical’). But Amis is less concerned with reconstituting the mysterious past of Mary Lamb (as she arbitrarily calls herself) than with exploiting her as a centre of deranged consciousness. For Mary the common world is defamiliarised. Thus, for instance, she tackles the telephone: ...”

“... came out, expensively illustrated by Lucian Freud. He got married to a woman called Priscilla Craig, whom he adored, they had a daughter, and his prosperous-looking figure in its well-cut suit stood out amid the squalor of Tambimuttu’s Poetry London offices. But in 1948 it all began to collapse. Priscilla left him, taking their daughter with her, and ...”

“... a career in teaching. After Edmonton County Grammar School he went on to read history at Queen Mary College, London. This was success beyond anything his parents could have aspired to, a benefit of the 1944 Education Act of which Strong is duly appreciative, but the reality was a tedious commute between uncongenial Winchmore Hill and the ‘architecturally ...”

“... the task of seeing the object as in itself it really is: the most famous example occurs in ‘The Mary Gloster’: Down by the head an’ sinkin’, her fires are drawn and cold, And the water’s splashin’ hollow on the skin of the empty hold – Churning an’ choking and chuckling, quiet and scummy and dark – In ‘ “The Trade” ’, Kipling ...”