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“... That faltering charisma, expertly rendered, also serves to repel and attract the reader. Danny Miller, the character at the heart of Border Crossing, is a direct descendant of Billy Prior, down to the inappropriately boyish name. Danny can no longer lay claim to that name, however. As a boy, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of an old ...”

“... As its title so obviously shows, the main thesis of Russell Miller’s book is that L. Ron Hubbard, inventor of Dianetics and founder of Scientology, was all his life an incorrigible liar. That being the case, it is a pity that the book starts off with a statement which sounds hypocritical at best. ‘I would like to be able to thank the officials of the Church of Scientology for their help in compiling this biography ...”

“... sagas’ like Njal’s Saga and The Laxdalers’ Saga works of unrivalled subtlety. William Ian Miller, who teaches law at the University of Michigan, wrote his study of the two sides of the saga, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking, 25 years ago. Since then he has written several books on awkward aspects of social interaction, including Humiliation (1993), The ...”

“... the two innocents are uncompromisingly green, in the sense that the Vicar of Wakefield, or Daisy Miller, or Crocodile Dundee, are green, their misfortunes illustrating the world’s vanities. Ginnie, the more important of the two, is round about thirty-five, born therefore in 1960, although it seems to be much earlier (she remembers when people made lamps ...”

“... writers of her day – George Eliot, the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet as Christanne Miller points out, Dickinson didn’t actively support the political campaign for women’s rights ‘or, apparently, sympathise with women generally’. It is in the radical new language of the poems themselves that the battle against the father is fought. Take ...”

“... Women have always written about men,’ Jane Miller remarks in Women Writing about Men (1986),but they have needed to be extremely circumspect about doing so. To read as a woman is to confront that circumspection as a mode of being and a kind of language … Of course, I too want to hear what women writers have been telling us about women ...”

“... Unsettlingly cheery. Underneath He’s ninety per cent Theory, One of us. While others idly prate Tom will ‘articulate’, post ’68. Which brings us to the ones We still most love to hate. Also imported from Abroad We have three Pom belles-lettrists Who, to judge from their expressions, Might not be turning up To all our sessions: The LRB’s Karl ...”

“... sneered the American expatriate. ‘The game has no place in my life.’ I don’t know if Henry Miller was a football fan, but after reading his long-lost novel Crazy Cock, which was located by Miller scholar Mary Dearborn, together with Dearborn’s biography of the quintessential American writer in Paris, I suspect that ...”

“... Even as late as the 1950s, at the height of his fame as a playwright, Arthur Miller would periodically leave his nice house to hang around the dockyards. He had worked for two years in the 1930s at a car parts warehouse, where he first encountered anti-semitism and suspicion. Reading Russian novels on his way into work, he found, when he considered it later, that the workers ‘feared his intelligence, his application, his ambition and his thrift, taking all these as tokens of his Jewish identity ...”

“... British writer who matters?’ Not one, he suggests, can stand comparison with Marquez, Kundera, Tom Wolfe. What can the editor of the Independent have made of the claim that the writers praised and published in his pages do not matter? Perhaps he felt that it did not matter that D.J. Taylor felt that British writers do not matter. No doubt he is familiar ...”

“... begins her adventures not in obscurity, like Cleland’s Fanny Hill, but, like Fielding’s Tom Jones, as the foundling adoptive child of aristocratic parents in a paradisal country house. Seduced by her foster-father Lord Bellars, Fanny takes, like Tom, to the road, whereupon she falls in with witches and is ...”

“... Rebecca West. She lives with her tough, rowdy mother, the Beldam West, and their cat, Vinegar Tom, in a cramped cottage on the outskirts of Manningtree, a small port town in north Essex where the Stour widens into an estuary. Rebecca and the Beldam usually get by doing laundry and needlework, but it’s 1643, a year into the First English Civil War, which ...”

“... of any of them at Hogwarts, for instance). If one remembers them, the memory comes from reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays, or even Tom Brown at Oxford, in which the medieval practice survives of allowing poor boys or young men to scratch an undignified education as ‘servitors’ to their betters, permitted to sit in on ...”

“... boxing: Scannell sets up women characters to argue against the sport. Dave Ruddock’s mate, Tom, persuades him to appear on Radio Leeds, to be interviewed by Tom’s girlfriend. She says reproachful things: ‘You know quite well that the kind of blow you’ve been trained to deliver could kill a man.’ Dave ...”

“... blows last month in the literary pages of all the major papers over Darrieussecq’s latest novel, Tom est mort, a first-person narrative of a mother’s attempt to come to terms with the death of her small child ten years earlier. In 1995 Laurens had published Philippe, an autobiographical work about the death of her infant son the previous year. Darrieussecq ...”