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“... Grown up, she is seduced and bullied into a septic abortion by her timid, clap-ridden fiancé Tim. He changes his mind, but too late: Sadie is sterile. Tim, now a selfish husband, knows this, but lets the ignorant heroine attend the infertility clinic for a year before some friendly lady gynaecologist breaks the male ...”

“... were using much the same language. With complete assurance, editorials, columns and op-ed page articles purported to locate characteristics that have supposedly been present for centuries in these little-known Balkan peoples. For many Western commentators talking about the Serbs was a way of defining their own cultural superiority. Offering their ...”

“... in the late Sixties, when real estate was cheap, plentiful and luring the likes of Tom McGuane, Tim Cahill, Jeff Bridges, Peter Fonda and the late Seymor Lawrence. Frontier towns like Livingston and Boulder Creek are today about as close as you can get to a nursing home for Sixties’ veterans and survivors of the more recent Hollywood filmscript wars ...”

“... put his name forward and years later fails even to recognise him at a cocktail party. The opening page of The Breezes (1995) clarifies the pessimism of the first novel. John Breeze’s mother was ‘killed by lightning’, we learn, but we mustn’t suppose lightning can’t strike twice. John thinks of Wile E. Coyote, whose crackpot attempts to catch Road ...”

“... of the original, something Quigly frequently alters. This seems crucial on the novel’s first page where Morante sets up three short paragraphs, the first establishing the boast contained in the name, which is then dismissed with ‘unfortunately’, which opens the second paragraph. This second paragraph then speaks of Arturo’s feelings for the person ...”

“... Chateaubriand calculates, ‘twenty times societies have formed and dissolved around me.’ On page 30 of a work that would run to three volumes, the central theme is emphatically stated: ‘This impossibility of duration and continuity in human relations, the profound forgetfulness that follows us wherever we go, the invincible silence that fills our ...”

“... absolute difference (or ‘otherness’). From this vantage point, Greek culture exists not on the page, but in the alien world of rituals, sacrifices, scapegoats and goat-songs that lies behind it. But for how much longer will this compartmentalisation of ‘modernising’ and ‘primitivising’ approaches be sustainable? There are strong indications of an ...”

“... expectations. Among the circle is a youngish protégé of Guy’s, almost his ward – a painter, Tim Reede. A painter without enough talent or enough dedication, a drop-out, a scrounger, a lost soul, treated with half-contemptuous tolerance by the rest of the friends and relations. He is likeable and sympathetic, but his equally drop-out girlfriend Daisy is ...”

“... At some point in his mid-forties, the novelist Tim Parks developed a terrible pain, near-constant and located in embarrassing places: his lower abdomen and crotch. ‘I had quite a repertoire of pains at this point: a general smouldering tension throughout the abdomen, a sharp jab in the perineum, an electric shock darting down the inside of the thighs, an ache in the small of the back, a shivery twinge in the penis itself ...”

“... consensus. Other fine novels were written in the Risorgimento period: Ippolito Nievo’s 900-page Confessions of an Italian, published posthumously in 1867, is a marvellous, picaresque account of the first decades of the century. But that book teems with north-eastern regionalisms, and is raucous, provocatively liberal and sexually explicit: not ...”

“... clarity of argument, compression, and honesty of feeling. I couldn’t blather all over the page as I found I could and did when I attempted free verse. Pouring my spirit into a cup into which some poet I admired had poured his, I found I was seized with an energy that came from outside myself. My inspiration was heightened; and because I was ashamed to ...”

“... collective art of the Redgraves is true.’ There is less reverence and more gossip to be had from Tim Adler’s The House of Redgrave, which describes Vanessa wrapping a napkin around her head and singing ‘Edelweiss’ at Natasha’s wedding, accompanied by Rupert Everett. On the other hand, Adler has a curious obsession with Vanessa’s second-rate film ...”

“... liberal, prudente e saggio to those of a giovinastro and a paggio (a callow adolescent and a mere page). The page Cherubino, despite his giddy youth and relatively menial role, is of course a lad of good family. The post in the Count’s regiment to which he is so unavailingly despatched carries the rank of an officer; and ...”

“... from Seeing Things (1991). When I see these marks, they connect not only the words on the page, but me to my father. And I sometimes wonder if my turning to writing poetry, shortly after my father’s death – kickstarted by my reading all the volumes of poetry he had accumulated in his lifetime – was an attempt to connect to him, to hang on to him ...”

“... of hers since Oxford, gives an account of a posh dinner she once attended with her then fiancé, Tim Binyon. A flunkey at the door asked for their names so that he could announce them. ‘Paralysed with shyness,’ Bennett writes, Mary-Kay ‘told him it didn’t matter (and may even have said that she didn’t matter). Tiresomely, this gilded fly ...”