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“... and envy, superiority and inferiority. Once education ends – at 16, 18 or 22 – we are plunged straight into the adult world – a world also propped up by notions of age and attainment. A career is a hierarchy of jobs, still predominantly a male affair but no less real for that, with a timetable attached so that people know what rank they should have ...”

“... doing a spell of research at Harvard, and Joe welcomes her back with a picnic, which they take straight from Heathrow to the Chilterns. It’s a blustery day for an idyll, but otherwise everything is wonderful. ‘Each leaf seemed to glow with an internal light. We talked about the purity of this colour, the beech leaf in spring, and how looking at it ...”

“... the inability may more properly belong to our culture, since James took a lot of his names straight from the Times – and certainly suffers from no such inability himself. ‘Drawbridge, a butler’, he writes. ‘Blackhead, a civil servant’. ‘Stringham … Roderick … Watkin … Tokenhouse’. But then we might remember that Powell borrowed the ...”

“... of the family is there any blame for Margaret’s obsessive struggles to put the tragic mix-up straight. ‘I did feel that Margaret had treated me differently,’ says Valerie. ‘It was impossible for her to hide the fact I wasn’t naturally hers.’ But she adds: ‘I’d defy anybody who has a cuckoo in the nest, to give that cuckoo the same amount of ...”

“... a job application to the fledgling CIA). The book’s editors, JPat Brown, B.C.D. Lipton and Michael Morisy, founded and run the website MuckRock, where anyone can file a Freedom of Information Act request with the US government, and which is the source of the files in Writers under Surveillance. Files on the living can only be obtained by their subjects ...”

“... queen whose letters and speeches display far more diplomatic evasiveness than empirical straight-talking, whose suitors included Eric of Sweden, Don Carlos of Spain and the Duc d’Alençon, and whose characteristic style of dress was about as plain and godly as that of Lady Gaga. It is equally odd, as Margaret Tudeau-Clayton’s splendid new book ...”

“... not to be confused with a novel of the same title by Anita Brookner). In the earlier book Michael Cullen left working-class Nottingham for the metropolis, fell into the proverbial bad company, and ended up as a convicted gold-smuggler. Now, having been abandoned by his wife after ten years of idleness in the Cambridgeshire village of Upper Mayhem, he ...”

“... memoirs of Hitler’s dog has achieved ironic elevation in Grass’s Hundejahre. Closer to home, Michael Hamburger has devoted himself to bringing German poetry before us and to maintaining its unity over time, space and civil warfare. Where, we must ask ourselves, do the books under review belong in the bushes that have sprung up along Hitler’s posthumous ...”

“... a layer of enigmatic stardust over films I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat ...”

“... New York Times out in the yard, where it’s tossed over the gate at 3 a.m. each morning, and gone straight to the paper’s website, because news printed nine or ten hours ago is too old to keep up with the fast-moving course of the Democratic nomination battle. As an Obama supporter, I tremble for him as one trembles for the changing fortunes of the hero of ...”

“... to look for ways of remaining unapologetically gay writers without writing ‘gay novels’. Michael Cunningham won a large readership with The Hours, in which gay lives featured without being allowed to predominate, though his touch seems less sure in his most recent offering, By Nightfall. A narrative about a married man’s brief and inconclusive ...”

“... In the Woody Allen movie Hannah and Her Sisters Eliot (Michael Caine) contrives to cross paths on a Manhattan street with his sister-in-law. Lee (Barbara Hershey), with whom he has fallen in love. He pretends to be hunting for a bookshop: she shows him the way to it and there he finds, as if by chance, E.E. Cummings’s Collected Poems, which he insists on buying for her ...”

“... perceptual material relates to such stratagems. Painters (well, some kinds of painters) must, as Michael Baxandall puts it, ‘backtrack down the channels of perception, undoing the integration of features that is higher perception’s achievement, pushing right back down to the early visual modules of brightness, colour and the rest’. To be interested in ...”

“... Durrell. There was nothing of the fake about Burgess, and no portentousness either. His best straight novels are his early ones, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East, which together with the earliest, Time for a Tiger, were published as The Malayan Trilogy in 1972. These reread very well, which Greene and Durrell on the whole do not, and are ...”

“... she needed to be seen in the context of life, a heroic six-footer, ‘Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head’, or, as what she was often called, ‘the Irish Joan of Arc’. Her patriotic achievements, like her beauty, are now largely celebrated in commentaries on Yeats, as indeed she expected: but she was independently well worthy of ...”