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“... protagonist is the poet-composer Ivor Gurney, who was a patient there from December 1922 until his death from tuberculosis 15 years later. Edric’s fascination with lives on the margins makes Gurney a logical choice. As a poet, his star has spent decades slowly rising. Two collections, Severn and Somme (1917) and War’s Embers (1919), were greeted with a ...”

“... I dislike the cult of dreams,’ Sarah Ferguson declares. ‘They should be secret things, and people who are always telling you of what they have dreamt irritate me. Nor do I like hearing psychological discussions between those who do not really know what they are talking about. There is something soft and messy about such people ...”

“... Only Human rattles through the lives of Adam, Cain and Noah and retells the story of Abraham and Sarah. But the omniscient third-person narrative is interrupted; the novel’s central character is God and Diski lets her deity have a point of view. In extended monologues, God looks down on the world, judging the ‘happy, human family’: ‘What ...”

“... The study of English political history has suffered a grievous loss with the death of Stephen Koss in New York on 25 October last. Though only 44, hardly more than half my age, Stephen had already established himself as an authority of the first rank on British political history in the 19th and 20th centuries. He wrote outstanding biographies of such Liberal leaders as Asquith, John Morley and Haldane, concluding with A ...”

“... which readers conveyed to Richardson or to Dickens over the fate of Clarissa or Paul Dombey (whose death ‘threw a whole nation into mourning’) is disconcertingly replicated in popular responses to radio and TV soap-operas. What Flaubert was to extol as novelistic ‘illusion’ has obvious affinities with the hoax and other forms of vulgar ...”

“... isn’t pointed up but it does seem to relate to the way Bainbridge’s characters often encounter death when they’re most self-absorbed, most taken up with the temporary distractions of life. Chance tears through this false reality, revealing a world of instability and mortality. In some ways, it isn’t surprising that these themes are more prominent in ...”

“... My problems began​ in 1984 when I wrote letters to Francis Pym and Sarah Kennedy about the Falklands War and Sir Robin Day’s part in it. Sarah was presenting a radio programme and I thought she was talking about me when she spoke of a young man who had just lost his mother. Francis Pym said, ‘Guns fire from Number 10’ on the Sarah Kennedy show ...”

“... Not much is known about Sarah Losh and those biographical facts which have survived offer little more than a misleading series of clichés. Born on New Year’s Day, 1786, into a solid and prosperous county family in Cumbria, Sarah, or Sara as she first called herself, was the eldest of three surviving children ...”

“... does not offer. She will have to bring the baby to term. A run-up to life turns into a run-up to death.Nettel, who was born in Mexico City and has lived in France, Canada and Spain, has published three previous novels and five collections of short stories. Solitude, the vulnerabilities of the body, unearthing the beautiful in the strange, outsiders who are ...”

“... Sully-Prudhomme (1901) over Zola, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1903) over Ibsen and, after Ibsen’s death, Paul Heyse over Hardy (1910). Ibsen had been friendly with Bjørnson and Heyse and knew what he was up against. No wonder he sought to engage with idealism more and more explicitly by depicting idealist characters in his work. His most programmatic ...”

“... book which infers the motives – generally ignoble ones – of the authors under discussion. The death of the author has occurred, in this case both literally and theoretically, and Howell can divine whatever motive and meaning she pleases. Was Dickens spiteful about the American national character because of its publishers’ practices? Was that ‘flat ...”

“... a documentary made on the day of the funeral, in which a bag lady was asked for her opinion on the death of the Princess of Wales: ‘Oh, she’s died has she? I wondered why there were so many people about.’ Ten years on, with so many more screens and pages clogged with celebrity, and the broadsheets gone overtly tabloid, it isn’t entirely obvious what ...”

“... agencies looks real, and all the rest looks like fantasy. Like the young Michael Innes, Sarah Caudwell both respects and flouts the conventions of the detective story. Thus was Adonis murdered is a very modern novel using the archaic epistolary method of Clarissa: aptly enough, because it has as much to do with seduction as with detection, and ...”

“... to learn more about his father’s role in such disappearances. Eventually, after his father’s death, he confronts his mother with the familiar question: ‘What did Father do during the war?’ The answers are too uncertain to be satisfying. He served on ‘the military court in Strasbourg’; among other things, he once sentenced an officer to ...”

“... placed under acute strain by Edward’s unkingly conduct in the few months since his father’s death – his feckless hedonism, his dangerous political naivety and his neglect of the more tedious duties of his role. His abdication – an entirely characteristic act of childish stubbornness – was an unprecedented shock to a system founded upon ...”