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“... Frank Kermode’s review of the new Gissing biography (page 9) brings to mind a project which I have long thought someone ought to tackle: a fearless update of New Grub Street. The job wouldn’t be too taxing – indeed, in many cases, it would be all too easy to attach contemporary names to Gissing’s sunken literary types: his principled dullards as well as his sleek chancers ...”

“... which he made his way. Futility was turned down by 13 publishers before he sent it to the dying Katherine Mansfield, who got it published at once; it was a success, but not the wild one he seemed to expect. His choice of reader was shrewd: for all that he has to say about the English Romantics and Goethe and Proust, his true Penelope was Chekhov, a humorous ...”

“... and the extravagant letters, that kept her interested for so many years. With others, such as Katherine Mansfield, the spell worked only for a few moments, but it worked. To T.S. Eliot he was Mr Apollinax, devouring the afternoon with his dry, passionate talk; but apparently the afternoon wasn’t all he devoured with it. And considering that his lovers ...”

“... parish of St George, Canterbury, in February 1564. He was the son of John Marlowe, shoemaker, and Katherine née Arthur, a Dover woman. They had nine children, though only five survived childhood. Christopher was the eldest son, and after the death of his sister Mary in 1568, the eldest child in the family. His father was ...”

“... before he found out exactly what occurred in sex between men and women. (This gives extra point to Katherine Mansfield’s joke about Howards End, written quite close to the time of the great discovery: ‘I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatally forgotten umbrella.’) He had his first full homosexual ...”

“... for me, in my innocence, to read them. One must acknowledge, however, that Richard Cobb is not Frank Kermode, nor Angus Wilson D.P. Walker. I had come knowing what Britain’s preconceived ideas were: her pragmatism and refusal of abstraction, her solitary traditions and diehard taste for erudition and travail honnête, however ...”

“... all these sentences could have been written by the same person, the person who wrote ‘Frank drops me off outside the sisters’ flat,’ ‘You could hear the kids yelling in the pool,’ ‘I could hear kids on the waste ground behind me,’ ‘The travel-agent smoked in the empty church’ – first sentences, by different writers, from an ...”

“... not only confederates but enemies. Gosse, for example, hated him. Yeats, he fancied, disliked him. Katherine Mansfield was a thick-skinned toady. Of Middleton Murry, toward whom he had once felt quite warmly, he says: ‘I think something conclusive must be done about Murry.’ A month later he is thanking Murry for an exceptionally pleasant weekend, but, as ...”

“... men and women, are nicer than most folks in fiction, or in fact. They are a lot nicer than Frank Tuohy’s characters. But then, niceness is not all. Some of Tuohy’s stories wander rather mournfully through Maugham country, highlighting various modes of English exile, and reminding us that failure is usually shoddy rather than spectacular, that life ...”

“... any scandal, allowing the writer to puff and genuflect and conceal his way to glory. Take Frank Kermode’s Not Entitled, a memoir typical of a generation of men who thought things were best said by not being said at all. Plante, however, is a throwback to the days of Barbara Skelton and the Comtesse de Boigne. In the years covered by his diary, he ...”

“... footnotes, that this ‘critic, biographer and man of letters’, born in 1849, was knighted. Frank Schuster (1840-1928), ‘wealthy musiclover and giver of parties’, was still giving parties, and Sassoon spends a great deal of time in his radiance or under his shadow, making the most of the lavish facilities offered but carping to his diary. Butlers ...”

“... In April 1959 Frank O’Connor wrote to his editor at the New Yorker to say that he had taken ‘the family up to Sligo to see how Yeats was getting on’. Since Yeats had been dead twenty years, he should have been getting on just fine. But: Even he seemed to be disgruntled. Kavanagh the ex-poet ran into me soon after I came home, and the following conversation took place exactly as recorded ...”

“... light-plays that are actually time and motion studies by the ‘scientific management’ theorists Frank and Lillian Gilbreth; the Rockefeller Centre, seen from a daringly Constructivist angle by a Soviet photographer; candid photos of rural Americans by the Soviet humorists Ilf and Petrov, taken on their ‘American road trip’; young Muscovites gazing ...”

“... obvious gaps in this plump epistolary corpus are letters to or from women, in whose company, as Katherine Duncan-Jones has convincingly argued, Sidney seems always to have been most happy, productive and at ease. There are no surviving exchanges with his wife, Frances, or with his sister, Mary, and no letters relating to his time at Wilton House in ...”

“... a friend, ‘I admit to a taste for certain affectations and ornamental commissions.’ He was as frank as he could be about his artful concealments. His extensive correspondence with his family (just over 650 pages of letters to his mother, father and maternal grandmother), taken together with Mariani’s gruelling account of the parents’ marriage, makes ...”