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“... her assimilation into writing, whereas everything is fuel for Bellow’s virtuosity. Alice Munro – more or less her contemporary – might have been a more useful model for Howland. Munro makes her style and form out of her authorial hesitation, incorporating into her sentences her doubt over her right to use her ...”

“... One hundred​ years ago, a soldier named Hector Hugh Munro was shot in the head as he crossed no-man’s-land. The night had been dark. Some of the soldiers accompanying him had lit up when they stopped to rest, and the glowing cigarettes attracted a German sniper’s attention. His last words were reported to be: ‘Put that bloody cigarette out!’ The soldier was perhaps the wittiest writer Britain had; his other name was Saki ...”

“... the present owner, dated 1999, and a letter and note to Laukamp from an Egyptologist called Peter Munro at the Free University of Berlin, dated 1982, conveying an analysis of the contents of the papyri by a colleague of his, Professor Fecht. That was all.While lamenting the meagreness of the provenance materials, King was reluctant to discuss the subject and ...”

“... in England, viz: watching fishes swim under the bridge, throwing stones at pigs etc’; Thomas Munro, an officer in the Madras section of the East India Company army, swapped his dreams of ‘looking down from my elephant, invested in my royal garments’ for the reality of ‘walking in an old coat, and a ragged shirt, in the noonday sun’. ‘I ...”

“... abstract way – the draped dishevelled big bed, prodigal dressing table, strewn sofa …’ Alice Munro is at the plain end of the spectrum of style. ‘Maury was in the front bedroom looking for his swimming trunks, though everybody had told him that the water would be too cold for swimming. He said the store would not be open.’ The facts ...”

“... Bob, but not in big cities.’ You see that, sometimes, she fuelled her loves with hates. Alice Munro​ , writing in 1980, laid her finger on the sore spot of Cather appreciation in a short story called ‘Dulse’. The narrator, a 45-year-old woman, encounters an 81-year-old Cather devotee at a country inn – a deliberate echo, perhaps, of Cather’s ...”

“... cost of several million pounds. All these toys – entertainments commissioned by the curator Jane Munro – are a prelude to the museum’s current big exhibition, Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish (until 25 January), a show that begins by being about the mannequins, or lay figures, that artists often used as technical aids. More ...”

“... I spoke eagerly to him of my new admiration for the stories of our Canadian contemporary Alice Munro – only to learn that he already shared it. I felt as if I was sitting at his feet. There can’t have been many Oxford and Cambridge dons who might have said the same at that point. Another surprise involved another female writer. When he was 90, he gave ...”

“... reissued Revolutionary Road, a whole novel about a married couple arguing. What about Alice Munro? Could she attract them, truthful, small-scale and brilliant as she is? Or would they not have it, the clear reflection of the quotidian, the visceral, redeeming pain of recognition? As I wrote my novel I thought of them: I wanted to woo them and yet I ...”

“... to prime the fiction lists for books like these. Other star performers are the stories of Alice Munro and the authorised translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Non-fiction lists are usually populated by textbooks and get-rich-quick titles. There is also a mountain of health guides. Study, wealth and longevity: these are the three cardinal themes for ...”

“... Indians. Pitted against the idealised Uncas is the demonic Magua; both desire the same woman, Cora Munro, who, intriguingly, is not ‘without a cross’ herself, for she has inherited from her long-dead mother a trace of Creole blood. This distinguishes her from her insipid half-sister, Alice, who spends most of her time either trembling like a leaf or in a ...”

“... motive, an intruder that disrupts domestic tranquillity or workplace banality; leave it to Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore or Joshua Ferris. The disease is out of place in Saunders’s skewed world. His stories are more satisfying when his characters’ good intentions bring about their undoing. Something of the sort happens in ‘Escape from Spiderhead’, set in ...”

“... gaucherie.’ Nearly fifty years later, Leavis dedicated his Clark Lectures ‘To the Memory of H. Munro Chadwick and Mansfield D. Forbes, to whom the world owes more than it knows’ – praise indeed. Having described the opening for the ‘intelligent study of literature’ that the framers of the new Tripos had provided, Leavis gives all the credit to ...”