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“... cookery book in 1960, as part of my trousseau. It was called Plats du Jour, or Foreign Food by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd, a Penguin paperback with a seductive pink jacket depicting a large family at table – evidently not a British family, for its members, shirt-sleeved, aproned, some of them children, were uncorking bottles, slicing ...”

“... There was no shortage of female film critics, and architecture, as the journalist and food writer Patience Gray discovered, was considered by the mainstream press to be close enough to home-making to constitute a suitable subject for a woman, along with ‘youth … design and craftsmanship’. Gray found herself in ...”

“... keys to otherwise puzzling patterns of behaviour. Among the persisting values discussed in Jack Gray’s Rebellions and Revolutions are those of collective responsibility, respect for the elderly, economic egalitarianism and outward conformity to the changing dictates of authority. Surprisingly, neither Spence nor ...”

“... himself’. Why would a man already cartooned in Punch and burlesqued by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience, which had opened in New York and other American cities months before his arrival, still ‘need’ America to ‘liberate’ him or to make him celebrated? In what sense is a man, not convicted of any crime until 1895, who was to marry in 1884 and ...”

“... There were closer friends who shunned him: Beardsley, for instance, who owed him so much; John Gray, an early lover, for whose Silverpoints, prettiest of Nineties poetry-books, Wilde had paid; Lilly Langtry, to whom he had, at one time, brought a daily lily, and who claimed to have sent him money without having actually done so. Beerbohm did not spurn him ...”

“... the outset, but two of these novels are extremely long. Long novels make specific demands on our patience and attention, and in the end this can hardly help translating itself into a claim for their own importance: both Brightness Falls and The Lost Father constitute invitations to spend at least ten or twelve hours of our pressured lives listening to the ...”

“... discuss whether to give up foreign mujahidin who had lived among them for years. ‘You can have patience,’ General Mashud said, ‘or you can have carnage.’ Musharraf, at America’s insistence, chose carnage. He sent the troops in, and they were routed. Then, from the air, he managed to kill some prominent tribal warriors. No foreign fighters turned ...”

“... martyr to a subversive cult.’ This was wrong: ‘His childish hints at strange sins in Dorian Gray and other works are mere rhetoric … His one great hatred was of dullness, which is very dangerous and can raise a whole nation in its defence.’ Ford Madox Ford, in an article written in 1939, agreed about Wilde’s essential harmlessness, but viewed his ...”

“... ingenuity, of wrenching the national literature back onto the Modernist highway, as Alasdair Gray was able to do for the Scottish novel with Lanark. Whether this theory holds water or not, Bolger argues convincingly that the build-up to the recent explosion of Irish writing is literary-historical and has nothing to do with politics. Hence he undermines ...”

“... Shine isn’t one of those homoerotic-homophobic works, like Billy Budd or The Picture of Dorian Gray, that feels compelled to punish its pin-ups, it will only allow Helfgott to find redemption in the loving arms of women: (Catherine Susannah Prichard, a writer; Beryl Alcott, an organist; Sylvia, a wine bar owner; and Gillian (Lynn Redgrave), an ...”

“... repetitious parenthetical irrelevancies from James, which leave the old man ‘dazed’, she loses patience and insists James ‘ask him where the King’s Road is’. This, a little less elaborately, he does, and the old man says: ‘Ye’re in it.’ The ineffectual James of this narrative, though, is not necessarily pure matter of fact. A couple of chapters ...”

“... very tricky passage) the work has only a latent protection, but one which will wait, with infinite patience, until publication, when the various copyright clocks start from zero. Copyright inheres, not in the work’s ideas or techniques, but in the precise form of words which make it up. While it is protected, the copyright work is conceived of platonically ...”

“... to several scientific disciplines. Usually philosophy, as Hegel put it, ‘paints its gray on gray’ only when some other area of culture has done all the hard work. But for once it may be different. Psychologists and computer scientists may find that the philosophers have actually broken some exciting ...”

“... with Chloe had discovered in him dangerous virtues. Thoughtfulness, a degree of constancy, even patience itself.’ Salaman moralises further: A little good in a really bad person puts him just about on the same level as everybody else. The totally evil man is closed, self-contained, psychopathic, cannot be breached with normal appeals to ...”

“... The legend, essentially, is the one in Beatty’s fevered mind of a Faustian compact, a Dorian Gray-like perversion of human destiny. But Lillie was just trying to make the best of things under the circumstances: a perfectly human way to proceed, I should have thought. As for her soul – who’s to say? Lillie had the good fortune not just to be born ...”