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“... book editors made themselves great by ignoring this advice. The best of them – Maxwell Perkins, Robert Giroux, Joe Fox, Bennett Cerf – allowed many brilliant young things to roll about on their front lawns, and some days they even took a drink in the company of these writers, or let their dogs loose to lick their ...”

“... of conflict were still evident. Children played in burned-out buildings, and gangs of unemployed young men roamed the streets at night, robbing passers-by in order to buy food. Despite such events, Indonesia has somehow managed to achieve some degree of stability during the last decade. But it is only in the last two years that writers and reporters in the ...”

“... This is an important insight: but in the area of loss of faith Dr Collini’s touch is not sure. Robert Elsmere rightly receives his attention. Mrs Humphry Ward was Matthew Arnold’s niece, her place in the circle being given posthumous confirmation by her husband’s History of the Athenaeum. Robert Elsmere’s enormous ...”

“... attitudes and determinations were present in Quartermaster-Sergeant Grieve of Salonika. The young Grieve describes himself as being in ‘mental spate’; his intellectual life is ‘a debating society’, and he tells Ogilvie: ‘I feel like a buried city.’ These letters sizzle with energy; they also show an anxious desire to impress and, at moments ...”

“... panic among the monks. How did it come about? What are they to do with the child? The pretty young novice who makes eyes at him – could he be the responsible party? But where could he have found out how? Rachel Ingalls rollicks us over a barrel of theological conundrums immaculately conceived. It is the kind of material one would be overjoyed to relate ...”

“... paragraph that starts with Ben’s illness and death, and continues: because Ellen married too young, because Morris wanted to buy Herbie into the business, because Ellen left Flatbush for Bensonhurst and Bensonhurst for the world … because if Ben loved Ellen how could Ben love Betty, because Ellen tried to steal Ben away from Betty, because Gladys was ...”

“... The June 1947 issue of Life Magazine contains an article called ‘Young US Writers’, a round-up of 11 promising post-war authors. Of the 11, three are well-known today; of this famous trio, one is still alive, the other two subjects of recently published biographies. The first page of the feature is dominated by a large photograph of a superbly arrogant Truman Capote – 22 years old, tiny, but potent ...”

“... A reviewer faced with 1,155 pages about Robert Maxwell is entitled to look at the pictures first. Joe Haines’s biography contains over eighty photographs of his hero, many in colour. Mostly they show him hobnobbing with crowned heads, presidents or prime ministers, with a pop star or a footballer thrown in. One picture, more puzzling than some, is captioned ‘Maxwell and team, about to leave Ulan Bator in the Mirror jet ...”

“... Suppose Mr and Mrs Coleridge to be young SDP yuppies today, who have asked us to dinner. What impression of each should we get? Of an amiable but very silly young man who talked too much and put on a great show of domestic warmth and solidarity? Of a capable and animated young woman, witty and elegant without being a show-off; devoted to the husband without making a display of it; admirable cook, makes all her own clothes? That would be about right ...”

“... of your own; suitable candidates for this role would be an admiring younger brother, or a young and loving wife whose humble social background and limited education guarantee that she will always be beholden to you, however you behave. Conscious or unconscious, such was James Joyce’s strategy with regard to Dublin, to Ireland. From the age of 22 ...”

“... Robert Moses​ was a modernist pharaoh. Over the forty years from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, he became a virtual dictator of public works in all five boroughs of New York and much of its suburban surroundings. Almost singlehandedly, through chicanery, fraud and bullying, he created the modern infrastructure of the New York City area: expressways, tunnels and bridges, but also parks, beaches, swimming pools and high-rise housing projects ...”

“... inculcate Graves’s sexual difficulties. When on holiday with his family in Brussels in 1912, a young Irish girl staying in the same pension began a mild flirtation with the tautly coiled Graves, then on the cusp of manhood: ‘It frightened mc so much,’ he confesses, ‘I could have killed her.’ Amy was Alfred Graves’s second wife. His first had died ...”

“... first published in 1971 by R.C. Latham and W. Matthews (designated thus on the cover, but becoming Robert Latham and William Matthews on the title-page). If some books are classifiable as blockbusters, these 11 stout volumes are more of a Thames barrage. The last two of them, the Companion and Index, were the sole responsibility of ...”

“... become so common that it’s boring, the act itself almost beside the point, which may be a reason young people are reported to be having less of it. Obviously, sex doesn’t happen in a vacuum (that might be interesting); it’s often a way to discuss gender and power. That point, too, is a little tired, worn out from overuse, but it persists as justification ...”

“... Robert Edric specialises in historical backwaters. His novels, 19 to date, unfold in isolated fishing villages, colonial outposts or Alpine spa towns. What these places have in common is that they seem removed from larger political conflicts, though they replay them in claustrophobic miniature. Edric’s imagination has always been drawn to the peripheral, to characters who are set apart, or seeking a geography to match their sense of spiritual exile ...”