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“... in 1959. It was about the Infancy Narratives. Brown lets you know when he is consciously sailing close to the wind; he enjoys a good measure of freedom but it is far from absolute. Vermes is in a completely different situation, having no need to fear ecclesiastical censure. Over the years he has written prodigiously about the customs, beliefs and writings of ...”

“... immersed in Ibsen and Pirandello, and was determined to become a playwright. The Law Courts were close to the engineering library in London where he was supposed to work, and he used the public galleries like a theatre. He haunted the real theatre, jotting down scenes from Ben Travers plays to see how they looked on paper, accumulating backstage technical ...”

“... almost ‘stupid’ in Ivan’s terms. But minds can be scoundrels, and the first mind we see in close-up in the novel is one of them. Here is Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, patriarch of what Dostoevsky’s narrator calls ‘this nice little family’, agreeing to let Alyosha become a novice at the local monastery. He is ‘half drunk’, and having a terrific ...”

“... though there is no place for anger in his elegant little study of the great lady. Her close association with W.B. Yeats, with nationalist aspirations, and with certain stormy evenings at the Abbey Theatre, made her famous in her day, but it seems that her day has passed. The twenty-odd volumes of her works – dramas, folklore ...”

“... on both papers. He launched D.H. Lawrence; he was for years Conrad’s indispensable prop; he was close to his revered Henry James, though perhaps less close than he thought. He was on companionable terms with Wells, Joyce, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the ungrateful Hemingway. Throughout his life he strove to keep up with les ...”

“... Forty years ago, Roy Fuller was taking a close look at himself and finding the image unsatisfying, already a little disappointed. This one is remembered for a lyric. His place and period – nothing could be duller. In his new book of poems there is one called ‘On Birkett Marshall’s Rare Poems of the 17th Century’: Coppinger, Pordage, Collop, Fayne, Fettiplace, Farley, Chamberlain – They could be the darling poets of my youth: I almost search among the names for mine ...”

“... that in his day art had rediscovered those lost antique skills, built on them, and was now close to perfection. To make representations look deceptively real, and to remain untroubled by considerations of what ‘real’ could possibly mean, was the aim of the artist, and the function of the critic was simply to admire the technical accomplishments ...”

“... didn’t enter his head. What’s more, he has only just got under way: for all that it contains close on 200,000 words, this book is merely an antechapel to the main building. It considers the career of Conrad from Almayer’s Folly to Lord Jim, and it does so at its own majestic pace. The section on Heart of Darkness is much longer than the novella ...”

“... with his publisher to label the first and last gatherings of The Unfortunates as opening and close, to avoid confusing readers, thereby greatly reducing the randomness he had wanted to prevail, but giving his readers a break. Since there isn’t a great deal of development in the story anyway, what is left is not very different from a conventional ...”

“... The Enchanter lacks these charms. The complexities of its language (the English certified as very close to the tortuous Russian) are oppressive rather than enlivening. What does seem worthy of Nabokov is the rendering of the detail of the girl’s body, and of the man’s intense desire. There are other good things – for instance, his devious and sometimes ...”

“... more richly endowed with time than such borrowings can explain. His memoirs name a great many ‘close friends’, and one conjectures that he was also exempt from the rule that the maintenance of even a few close friendships takes quite a lot of time. How to preserve a great many of them while troubleshooting for all and ...”

“... some of his most profound statements on art, society, religion and the creative process. Joseph Frank’s biography calls these years ‘miraculous’ yet the conditions under which Dostoevsky was working were anything but splendid. In the novels, thrilling conversations about ultimate questions typically take place in the most sordid settings, as when Ivan ...”

“... waited for a moment before he inspected the other and then pulled that up too. ‘Have you seen Frank lately?’ he asked. ‘Once or twice since Christmas,’ she said. ‘He has too much parish work to come and visit me very much, and maybe that’s the way it should be. It would be terrible if it was the other way around, if he saw his mother more than ...”

“... Greenwich) poets, including Cecil Day Lewis, John Pudney and G. Rostrevor Hamilton, as well as his close friend Julian Symons, the dedicatee of this book, and the poet’s poet son, John Fuller. There are some sympathetic pages about another neighbour, Bonamy Dobrée. But the extent of Fuller’s writerly acquaintance is much wider than this suggests; many a ...”

“... to their world, not to the Gorbals. The mere facts are indestructibly interesting: what comes close to spoiling them is laboured hindsight, expressed in unpersuasively heavy-handed prose. A pity; but what makes autobiographies ‘worth it’ is good writing. Underneath the thick paint there is a document of some historical value, but the technique that ...”