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“... sarcasm and rage that alienated virtually all his friends. He picked on the ever-insultable Scott Fitzgerald, taunted Archibald MacLeish for not having a ‘big enough prick’, razzed Gertrude Stein as the ‘lesbian with the old menopause’. Things only got worse after 1936, when sour reviews of Green Hills of Africa left him more than usually depressed ...”

“... uninspired contribution from Katherine Bucknell. Wendy Lesser remarks on what she sees as Penelope Fitzgerald’s uncanny ability to re-create alien cultures. In his deceptively off-the-cuff critical style, Michael Wood writes sensitively of Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, pointing out that for Rushdie there’s no place like home in a rather more sombre sense ...”

“... Cambridge introductions to ‘British and Irish Authors’, a high-quality series which includes Patrick Parrinder on James Joyce and John Batchelor on H.G. Wells. Barnard gets a great deal into his short book, presenting a rather different Keats from that of the many other Keats scholars and biographers. Keats’s vividness has been present to his admirers ...”

“... divergences became more evident. McInerney achingly, almost poignantly, longed for the F. Scott Fitzgerald doomed glamour of extravagance and careless waste, raptures of the deep followed by hangovers of the damned. McInerney, you felt, craved critical and collegial approval, the respect of his peers and elders (he and Norman Mailer became friends), a place ...”

“... to both communities’. Almost exactly a year later, the same two leaders (Thatcher and Garrett FitzGerald) concluded the more far-reaching Anglo-Irish Agreement. In November 1986, Sinn Féin voted to end its traditional policy of not putting up candidates for the Dáil. During the next two years, both the SDLP (publicly) and the Irish Government ...”

“... Jesuit journal Studies which contained what Roy Foster calls a ‘swingeing exposé of lacunae in [Patrick] Pearse’s ideology’. The piece was not published for six years. The editors felt that Ireland was not ready for a critical examination of Pearse. For those involved in commemorations in Ireland, in 1966 as now, history has no complications or ironies ...”

“... of 41. The ideal life, we often joked, would have been to have spent the Twenties drinking with Fitzgerald and then been killed in Spain alongside John Cornford and Julian Bell. Jeremy fell immediately for James Dean on seeing East of Eden and Rebel without a Cause. A few years later he was even more passionately drawn to the Polish actor Zbigniew ...”

“... Bicycle Race’ was the acknowledged inspiration for J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’. The psychosexual derangement of Ballard’s Crash would have dissolved into low comedy if the humble Raleigh had replaced the Ford Cortina as the vehicle of choice for navigating the edgelands of suburban ...”

“... spirit of sophisticated cultural malaise and psychosexual malfunction so palpable in Hemingway or Fitzgerald. As Acocella puts it, Cather went on giving readers ‘stories about noble-minded people living in small towns, often in the past. She did not examine her characters’ stream of consciousness or, for the most part, their sex lives. She examined their ...”