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“... birth, life, death and meteoric rise to fame, Ern Malley has continued to provoke virulent debate. Michael Heyward’s shrewd and funny book not only provides full social and literary contexts for the affair, but explores Malley’s almost equally intriguing afterlife. Much to the dismay of his two inventors, he was no sooner invented than he cut loose and set ...”

“... limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael Chabon. This came ten years too late for Yates, who died of emphysema and complications following minor surgery in 1992. His fiction is closely modelled on his own experiences and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a miserable place. The Easter Parade ...”

“... Celebration was concerned, modern ended in the 1930s. The future as defined by the brochure from Michael Eisner’s Disney Corporation was to be found not in Walt’s skyscrapers and monorails, but in a long-lost past of white picket fences and pastel dormer windows, so lost that perhaps it was entirely mythic: There was once a place where neighbours ...”

“... editor. We had a committee consisting of John Fuller, Francis Hope, Martin Dodsworth, Colin Falck, Michael Fried and Gabriel Pearson. We never had meetings or anything like that. There was a lot of correspondence, because John went to Buffalo for a year. So he wrote to me a lot from there. And Michael and Colin had already ...”

“... difficult to read Milton’s narrative in Paradise Lost in this way – we visualise the Archangel Michael’s two-handed sword not as the double lever on a printing press, but simply as a sword, while we see ‘chaos’ and the ‘abyss’ physically, as part of outer space. Yet Milton, the adept student of Spenser, was designing a flexibly symbolic ...”

“... the scene Her purest of crystal and brightest of green; ’Twas not her soft magic of streamlet or hill, Oh! no – it was something more exquisite still. ’Twas that friends, the belov’d of my bosom, were near, Who made every dear scene of enchantment more dear, And who felt how the best charms of nature improve, When we see them reflected in looks that ...”

“... immigrants, and in the late 1950s the couple moved to a three-bedroom colonial house in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, which is fairly close to Philadelphia. Everyone you ask speaks of the Spahrs as a classic American postwar family, moderately affluent and natively tough, putting great stock in education, sports, mealtimes, prayers, memories, and earning ...”

“... strongest, most lasting influences.’ Readers might wonder where the poetry of Hughes, Heaney or Hill would be without some filtering of the tradition of Old English accentual poetry through Auden or Hopkins. Hopkins’s use of Old English is well-known (‘a vastly superior thing to what we have now’), but perhaps not the fact that Engels read Old English ...”

“... paedophile, martyr, traitor, major minor writer. In an Omnibus programme broadcast late last year, Michael Bracewell claimed that he was ‘the century’s first pop celebrity’, and tried to persuade us that, in the manner of an Elvis or a McCartney, Wilde was a working-class lad made good. Cut to a shot of Bracewell looking uncomfortable in a gargoyled ...”

“... best-known practitioners – all men of the same generation, born in the mid to late 1960s – are Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz and Jonathan Lethem. The books they wrote were interested in popular culture or counterculture as much as in the thoughts and passions of characters. Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) chronicled the rise of ...”

“... experience, the Canadian Department of National Defence commissioned a report, written by Roger Hill, and cited in Soldiers of Diplomacy. Its conclusions have not dated: ‘The UN has virtually no planning mechanism in New York to analyse past experience, monitor current operations or plan for future peacekeeping forces.’ It has ‘proceeded by a process ...”

“... a bibliography. He is what he watches, late at night. Charles Hawtrey, in his youthful pomp, in Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale. Hawtrey (pre-booze) with Will Hay. James Fox’s strangulated Elephant and Castle in Performance. Hitchcock’s expressionist version of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Seabrook’s work, before the wonderful accident of All the ...”

“... Keneally anatomises historical Australia by plucking from its origins a strange factual nugget. Michael Ondaatje does something similar for Canada with a wispy succession of word paintings eerily evocative of a past he cannot have known but can magically conjure. His prose is consciously poetic and at first sight seems more conditioned by the need to ...”

“... study can stand by Deryck Cooke’s magisterial I saw the world end (1979) and the long essay by Michael Tanner in the Faber Wagner Companion (1979). The other three recent books are built on shakier foundations. Ewans, the author of a fine study of Janáček’s operas, here traces the allegedly strong Aeschylean influence on Wagner, while Furness and ...”

“... established the Clinic for the Treatment and Study of Nervous and Difficult Children in Notting Hill. The child didn’t replace the neurotic; the neurotic re-emerged within the child.Klein’s model of the mind disorganised the difference between childhood and adulthood. Her eventual understanding of the mental positions between which we continually ...”