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“... were sceptical that readers could cope with his ‘bottomless et cetera’, Barthelme’s editor, Roger Angell, knew that what kept them coming back was the brilliant unexpectedness of the conceit or assemblage.The 1950s and 1960s were a great era of collage in all sorts of media: not just Robert Rauschenberg, but also John Ashbery and Bob Dylan. For ...”

“... so are grace, nobility and even the kindness that comes close to being flattery. ‘Van Dyck,’ Roger de Piles noted, ‘took his time to draw a face when it had its best looks on.’ He painted Charles I’s Queen, Henrietta Maria, as a handsome woman – without, it would seem, losing the likeness. Yet her niece, who knew her first from the painting, was ...”

“... investigators during the last three decades of the 19th century, the period dealt with in Roger Luckhurst’s study. Photography was of inestimable importance in disseminating the performance of the mediums, as well as offering a deep metaphor for the relation between external matter and immaterial thought. While the interplay between psychology and ...”

“... a couple of months later, in 2011, my first husband, father of my daughter, and my oldest friend, Roger. Then, during the final quarter of 2013, there were two more deaths within a month of each other, neither of them really unexpected after years of frailty, but both, Doris Lessing and her son, Peter, having attachments of some complexity to each other, to ...”

“... is enough to invoke, by conditioned reflex, the Agatha Christie cornerstone, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in ...”

“... In the spring​ of 1944, a young man was stopped at a checkpoint of the Pétainist milice outside the Saint-Germain-des-Prés metro station. According to his identity card, he was Julien Keller, aged seventeen, a dyer, born in the département of the Creuse. The bag he was carrying contained dozens of other fake identity papers ...”

“... Weschke is looking down at his hands or the tablecloth, a woman lies slumped in an armchair and a young man holds his head in an attitude of total weariness. At the other side of the table, the poet W.S. Graham is holding forth. He sits bolt upright, stabbing the air with the fingers of one hand; it looks as though an electric shock is passing through his ...”

“... to Mike Molloy, a Mirror reporter. Molloy confronts Gould, who refers him to his solicitor, Sir Roger Pelham. A few minutes later when the phone rang again Raymond still hadn’t moved. He picked up the receiver, his hand still shaking. Pelham confirmed that Molloy had been in touch with him.      ‘I presume you made no comment,’ said ...”

“... the reader’s sympathy into places it might not otherwise be led, as in this passage where a young West Indian describes the trials of early marriage and parenthood: we walkin out good till de firss baby come: bonnet pram bootie wettin de bed: evry body stannin rounn cooin like woo-dove: look how e favour e faddah they sayin: look e lil booee eye an e ...”

“... interest the Sunday Times, where I was then working. There was another guest, an aristocratic young man from the City whose role appeared to be that of prompting the MI5 officer – for that is what I took the man from ‘the office’ to be – when he hesitated over a real or pretended indiscretion. The conversation was all to do with the extent to ...”

“... may secretly yearn to ascribe to them. Toasting the engagement of the BBC’s man in the region, Roger Hearing, with a bottle of champagne which, a proud best man, I had resourcefully procured one night, I swallowed hard as he told me of witnessing killings at Rwandan Government checkpoints in the first days of the crisis ‘There was no passion. It was like ...”

“... But although his air of superiority, or his superiority, annoyed or hurt some people when he was young in Cambridge and Ceylon, and later as well, he obviously grew much more tolerant as time went on, as befitted his adherence to socialist doctrines which he might call peculiar but which seem entirely honourable, sincere and considered. Still, there remained ...”

“... posed in the studio. The subjects are deceit and seduction: one (known only from copies) shows a young cavalier being taught how to cheat at cards; in another a young cavalier has his palm read, and ring removed, by a pretty gypsy girl. These pictures were enormously influential, creating a whole new class of cabinet ...”

“... my mother was as I had never seen her, incredibly beautiful. Getting married, to a handsome young man in the schmatter trade. But under the beauty, her eyes shone steely. She was on her way. It was uncanny. The beauty and the cold eyes. This was her last chance, handing me over to a slightly famous writer. There were possibilities, but also the ...”

“... novels, but the mood has grown nastier. Brenda hooks up with Beaver, an indifferent and snobbish young man who is universally deplored and whom even Brenda recognises as second-rate, and demands a divorce. The beau monde is charmed by so fantastic a romance, and a broken Tony seeks to be obliging; but after various humiliations he puts his foot down and ...”