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“... Few writers​ have seemed less likely to produce a modern myth than Bram Stoker, not only because of the limits of his ability and imagination but because for much of his life he was furiously overworked as house manager for Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre in London. Aside from Dracula, Stoker wrote nothing of note, and plenty that was excruciating ...”

“... No one, certainly not a novelist like Philip Oakes, can resist the temptation to rearrange memories, impose some sort of order or pattern. In the same way that a novelist may write about his own life, disguising it as a tale about imaginary people, autobiography may be a sly form of fiction. And it follows that the success of an autobiography depends on whether or not he makes a good story of it ...”

“... the gravity of this situation to that of the Great War, and its consequence was, in Stuart Ball’s words, ‘a reshaping of the party system, and a new basis in the pattern of issues, which was to hold sway for the following fifty years’. The difficulties of 1929 to 1931 were of three kinds – imperial, economic and party-political. With Dominion ...”

“... for love.’ If Brookner writes about men as a species to be examined rather than understood, Philip Roth’s women are hardly more than receptacles for semen, emotional punching-bags or ministering angels. The fact that his novels have only one subject, Philip Roth, is made plainer than ever by Deception, which is ...”

“... In Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer, 23-year-old Nathan Zuckerman, ‘already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman’, makes a jaunty pilgrimage to the clapboard farmhouse of Emanuel Lonoff, the great Jewish-American writer whose work Zuckerman admires but aims to surpass. Although Lonoff writes about Jews, he has secluded himself in the goyish New England countryside in the hope of being left alone: ‘I turn sentences around ...”

“... this tradition: just because they could. This would also explain why Fifa have brought in a new ball, just in time for the Fifa World Cup Germany. Paul Robinson shelled out £420 on new balls just before the tournament to get some early practice in, and reports that it swerves more than the familiar ball and will be ...”

“... Bronx: ‘In our basement, the laundry machines and dryers are spinning. You pass me a rolled-up ball of baby socks, warm to the touch. Our household is large. There will be many cycles. Oh, my sweet endless Rouenna. Have faith in me. On these cruel, fragrant streets, we shall finish the difficult lives we were given.’ We can’t claim we weren’t ...”

“... inclusiveness: ‘We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in.’ For Prince Philip, the main enthusiast for abolition, it was presumably the agonising boredom. The passage of time has done little to improve the image of the deb. In so far as she still has a presence in the national imagination she is a figure of essential silliness, a ...”

“... They became, successively, the most influential publishers in the world: Philip Graham, who inherited the Washington Post from his father-in-law, Eugene Meyer, and his shy, self-effacing wife, Katharine, who took over the company when her husband shot himself in 1963. It was Philip Graham who induced John Kennedy to choose Lyndon Johnson as his running-mate in 1960 ...”

“... rubbage’: 236 families lost their homes there. The church survived, minus its spire; a cannon ball is embedded in the masonry. Even places that didn’t see any bloodshed suffered: husbands were absent fighting, disease spread, there was swingeing taxation and slumps in trade. In Battle-Scarred, a collection of essays that examine the physical and mental ...”

“... Life is too short to read Philip Larkin’s juvenilia. Reading ‘Trouble at Willow Gables’ and ‘Michaelmas Term at St Brides’ is up there with stuffing mushrooms: there is a part of me which, as I read – or stuff – has precognition of the moment of my death and the very last conscious thought, which is the blinding awareness of the precious hours wasted on Larkin’s schoolgirl stories or mushrooms when I might have done something more positive with them such as sleeping or filing my nails ...”

“... at his beer. All day long, between claps, the near-silence was broken only by the sound of bat on ball (like in the books) or – now and then – by the voice of Philip Edmunds coarsely berating his fielders, the umpire, the opposing batsmen, Fate – well, it sounded like Fate (as in ‘For Fate’s Sake’). I have never ...”

“... they win at last on an unlikely home run from Bobby Thomson – the story of the fight for the ball Thomson hit into the stands. After much struggle, and being chased along the streets until he makes it home to Harlem, Cotter manages to keep the ball. But then his slippery, drinking father sees money in it, and once the ...”

“... couple’s decision to do without a live-in maid particularly scandalised her mother. Their son, Philip, has reached the grand old age of eight without being sent away to school (‘Think of the opportunities already lost,’ Evelyn’s mother laments), so it’s clear the rebellion continues. Now Geoffrey has been made superintendent of the camp that has ...”