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“... Saturday afternoons to meet with small groups of students in a situation where they could do some close work and not merely listen to him ‘boom away’ at them in a large lecture theatre. He must have spent much time on preparatory reading, criticism as well as the actual texts. He didn’t write the lectures out but spoke from notes which he later threw ...”

“... to the ‘hit’, will accept what Ronald Schuchard calls in Eliot’s Dark Angel the ‘close connection in Eliot’s poetry between the rare moments of ecstasy and the recurring moments of horror’. Eliot identifies the presence of the latter in Charles Williams’s novel All Hallows’ Eve, in which he claims there is no ‘exploitation of the ...”

“... The recent publication in Britain of works by three such figures – Rodney Hall, Helen Garner and Frank Moorhouse – provides a convenient occasion for assessment. Rodney Hall’s career neatly exemplifies current trends. Hall began his literary life as a poet. Since 1962, the year in which he was awarded the first Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian ...”

“... hope. Another way of defining the China phenomenon is to examine one dominant institution, and Frank Ching in Ancestors chooses the family – his own, which he was able to trace back for 900 years. To review almost a millennium of Chinese history through the single genealogical line which leads to a young American journalist does reduce that history to a ...”

“... and refinement seemed within the reach even of relatively humble families’? Is it not close to hyperbole to suggest that the changes were so dramatic that the commercial people in the 1780s ‘did not, in any fundamental sense, inhabit the same society’ as their predecessors in the 1730s? What may puzzle some readers is the relationship between ...”

“... real impact.Could this all have been avoided? Corbyn was in a very difficult position. His own close allies had moved away from him on Brexit. His statement that he would remain neutral in a new referendum was ineffective. Was there any other way? Perhaps if Labour had stated clearly that the referendum and the chaos that followed it were the result of a ...”

“... declared, ‘seemed to me to be the trenches’: dug in, on guard, bayonet fixed. Not easy to close with. Isherwood is a very long, densely detailed book which contains a large amount of valuable new information. It tracks, particularly in its account of the early 1930s, much of the same ground as I did in my simultaneously published life of Spender, but ...”

“... Mae Morse doing ‘Cow Cow Boogie’, and, in his Hollywood debut, a slender young reed called Frank Sinatra. Even at the time, Sinatra’s cameo didn’t cause much of a stir, and Reveille doesn’t feature in many official filmographies; but it did mark, in its modest way, the inception of Sinatra’s solo career. He had just left the Tommy Dorsey ...”

“... to Newton’s achievement in his personality. Far and away the best psychohistorian of Newton is Frank Manuel. His Portrait was first published in the USA in 1968, and is here reproduced without alteration: even a howler on page 112 stands uncorrected. Manuel has published two other more specialised books on Newton, but this is his best all-round ...”

“... Albert Anastasia, head of the so-called Murder, Inc; Moe Dalitz, a prominent Jewish gangster; Frank Costello, Luciano’s understudy; Carlos Marcello, the crime boss of New Orleans; Santo Trafficante, scion of a prominent crime family in Tampa; and Lansky himself, born Maier Suchowljansky in Poland and raised on New York’s Lower East Side. In The ...”

“... Even if we may doubt that Hale was his Urania or his Beatrice it seems clear that they were rather close. But I’m bound to say that there is something disturbing about Gordon’s handling of all this. Her religiose attitude to the facts, a sort of muckraking sublimity, affects her prose as well as her argument, and the whole pseudo-allegorical and ...”

“... signified only itself’. This blankness is in part an effect of his subject-matter. Updike is close, some would say too close, to the familiar domestic scenes of middle America, its suburban marriages and infidelities, its big cars, high-school reunions, parades, arguments about drugs and race and Vietnam, images so ...”

“... years that followed I got to know him well. Another influence of that time was the fiction writer Frank Sargeson, who distrusted the university and warned me against an academic career. By 1955 I was married and living on Auckland’s North Shore close to the Sargeson house, at the back of which Janet Frame, recently ...”

“... myth – one we can still half assent to while half persuaded by the black, reductive alternative. Frank Kermode, while studying the mythopoeic patterns of The Spire, is surely right about the importance for that novel of a particular place, Salisbury, and a particular trade: ‘I don’t know exactly where he got the facts about the mason’s ...”

“... Cliffside Park, the next town south from Fort Lee. My folks went there quite often because it was close by and the food was good. That is, until my mother, who is given to irrepressible asides about people’s appearance and speculation about their personal lives, remarked to my father one evening at Duke’s: ‘How old could that little blonde number be ...”