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“... first thing a novelist must provide is a separate world,’ and it is true that the world Dr Green has made out of the relationship of Mark Pattison and Meta Bradley is not exactly a separate world. It is a familiar one, familiar from memoirs and gossip and our general contemporary interest in the Victorian age, but ...”

“... borrowed many of Bingham’s traits for his unassuming super-spy George Smiley (another model was Vivian Green, a chaplain at his school and his Oxford college, and a long-term mentor). The unmasking of some, but not all, of the Cambridge spies had left MI5 ‘riven with suspicion and rumour’. Cornwell seems to have run some agents and informers, and ...”

“... l’oeil, stuck in the lucid amber of her prose. Her portrait of her friend, the poet Renée Vivian, in The Pure and the Impure, has the finite quality of 19th-century fiction. ‘I remember Renée’s gay laughter, her liveliness, the faint halo of light trembling in her golden hair all combined to sadden me, as does the happiness of blind children who ...”

“... an advertising writer by day and a drummer by night, unsuccessfully pursues the young heiress Vivian Smith-Corona Alvarez de Real; a large number of sensationally beautiful women, Magalena and Irenita and Livia and Laura and Mirtila and especially the super-luscious Cuba Venegas, strut their stuff; it seems remarkably easy to fondle their breasts but ...”

“... mitigate certain embarrassing historical facts.Valery Larbaud (1881-1957) sounds as fictitious as Vivian Darkbloom or V. Cantaboff; but Larbaud existed, as poet, novelist, critic, translator, born in Vichy, son of an excessive mother and a quiet pharmacist father, who made a pile from discovering and bottling the mineral springs of Saint-Yorre and then ...”

“... and its Christian inhabitants belong to the 700,000-strong Arab minority inside the 1949 ‘green line’ of the Israeli state. Everyone in Fassuta has a story to tell, and the historical fact of dispossession means that this story is one of the few things they really own; their only inalienable possession is their personal history. Arabesques is dense ...”

“... any so-called artist, Turner writes: ‘Cash clearly felt that he was a misunderstood man – that Vivian not only didn’t understand the demands of his work but couldn’t accept his mercurial artistic temperament. June, on the other hand, he felt loved him for who he was.’ We’ve heard that one before. After years of anguish, Cash eventually left his ...”

“... bagpipes reminds me of the first cricket matches I watched from the Victorian pavilion in the lush green field of the Lawrence Gardens (now the Jinnah Gardens), where Majid Khan’s father (and Imran Khan’s uncle), the stern-faced Dr Jehangir Khan, used to open the innings, and where, in a crucial Test Match between India and Pakistan in the Fifties, our ...”

“... have not attended to the ‘current tendency’, Ludmilla Jordanova stamps her foot in the Bethnal Green Museum: ‘Social differences in clothing are not mentioned, nor are prices given. In fact, a number of the cases clearly contain expensive, hand-made or exclusive clothes. To imply that all children at a given time – the cases are structured by period ...”

“... know things about that the central character can’t know. Perspectives cascade. Bowman marries Vivian, whose mother is Caroline, whose father is Warren Wain, whose son is Cook, of whose life we get a tiny vignette before he is dropped, not to reappear. The munificence of access gives All That Is an excitable, digressive quality that sits strangely with the ...”

“... into the darker forms of ‘genre’ or ‘romance’ fiction. The ghost or horror story, The Green Man (the name of a public-house called after a local devil), in which 17th-century demons penetrate a modern psychological story involving a child; the ‘Thirties’ thriller or detective story, The Riverside Villas Murder, which is at the same time an ...”

“... is in cream yellow with bookcases (for review books etc), two chairs and a desk and an armchair, a green carpet (to come) and an electric stove, very high looking down over Woburn Square.’In January 1931 he describes his working day: ‘On Friday morning when I arrived the flamboyant Mr Alfred A. Knopf of New York (Inc.) with brilliant tie and stickpin was ...”

“... room as a postal address. And the woman became a very wealthy woman, she had a curtain place in Vivian Avenue.’‘I had her here to estimate for curtains,’ Mrs Rosen remembered.‘That’s right. And Jimmy was named as a co-respondent while he was living in Paramount Court.’Whether he was named as co-respondent to the curtain woman’s divorce, or one ...”