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“... Into the Heart of Borneo contains much pretty tiresome knockabout between the reverenced James Fenton, whose every quip is sacredly recorded, and the bumbling O’Hanlon. The precise descriptions of birds are far more entertaining. For this next trip O’Hanlon again approached James Fenton but received from the ...”

“... which might have come as something of a surprise to Chaucer or Pope. For liberals such as Henry James and David Lodge, it represents a venture into individual consciousness of unique worth – so valuable, in fact, that in this new novel Lodge suspects it may be the summum bonum. ‘Consciousness’ – the very term has an inescapably reifying ring to it ...”

“... Maclaren-Ross died of a heart attack in Ladbroke Grove. His last words, apparently, were ‘Graham Greene’ and then: ‘I love you.’ Obituaries expressed regret that Maclaren-Ross never wrote the great novel that had been expected of him, although friendly comments were made about ‘The Weeping and the Laughter’, a superb and enragingly incomplete ...”

“... I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day,’ he told his friend James Stern, ‘I feel ill.’ Spurred on by these complementary inducements – the need to make money and the need not to be sick – he wrote quantities of prose. It appeared, over the years, in an impressive range of journals, from Eliot’s Criterion and ...”

“... Tale dramatises a prose romance from 1588, Pandosto, appropriately written by the same Robert Greene who accused Shakespeare of being a plagiaristic ‘upstart crow’, while both The Tempest and Cymbeline borrow from Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, a creaky anonymous play of the early 1580s about an exiled courtier who lives in a cave and exercises ...”

“... had played for him; he had helped Marconi to transmit the first transatlantic radio signal; Henry James, ‘tears in his eyes’, would come running to him with a novelistic problem; Escoffier said he could ‘learn cooking’ from Ford. If Conrad, in a temper, banged his fist on the table and made the teacups jump, Ford must say that he threw the teacups ...”

“... these people and his fluency with their folktale motifs into a Midnight’s Children of Tangier. James Lasdun’s first collection of short stories, The Silver Age, doesn’t make much attempt to go in search of the ‘other’, but takes on what is perhaps a more severe challenge, present-day English middle-class life. Lasdun doesn’t ask What Then Must We ...”

“... thought of himself as a popular novelist, writing for a well-educated but broad audience. Graham Greene was the reader for Longmans who recommended publication of At Swim-Two-Birds and O’Nolan was ambitious for a Greene-sized readership. He sent a copy of his first novel to the popular novelist Ethel Mannin and ...”

“... Harrison, from Leeds, one day offered a mildly dissenting view on something to do with Henry James, Leavis declared: ‘Well Harrison, if you think that, you must be totally insensitive to the whole of English literature!’ ‘I hope I didn’t hurt poor Harrison,’ he said at the end of the seminar. We never had one-on-one tutorials with Leavis but ...”

“... were to marry, respectively, the politician Geoffrey Howe (now Lord Howe) and the architect James (later Sir James) Stirling’. Sometimes whole sentences seem designed merely to boast of good breeding: the good looks of the young Candida, Hillier announces, ‘rivalled those of the most stunning women ...”

“... Early on in his new novel, James Buchan employs an image of which he is evidently fond: that of two mirrors placed face to face, and the unique and disconcerting effect which they produce, of reflections endlessly reflected in reflections. The same mirrors turned up in Frozen Desire, Buchan’s autobiographical meditation on the meaning of money, where they served as a symbol of financial investment and the silent accumulation of compound interest ...”

“... coexist with separate Scottish imperial aspirations, and would continue to do so until the 1690s. James VI of Scotland, who went on to become James I of the Three Kingdoms, was as determined to impose Lowlands ‘civilitie’ on his ‘barbarous’ Gaelic Islands, by the sword if need be, as the English were to plant their ...”

“... The Woman’s Room, a university teacher and is in her forties. But French’s specialism was James Joyce, whereas Durer’s is Renaissance literature, so there’s no question of The Bleeding Heart’s being autobiographical. The opening of the novel finds Dolores on sabbatical leave, travelling between the British Library and the Bodleian. She catches ...”

“... none of them particularly amusing: ‘Damn it, here’s another digression.’ If, as Henry James put it, in every novel ‘there is the story of one’s hero’, and ‘the story of one’s story itself’, then the latter is a depressed and self-lacerating one. The most egregious example of Banville’s carelessness is in the novel’s strange ...”

“... she discovered Thackeray, Dickens and Fielding, and, later, black writers (Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston) who informed her own experience and that of ‘the Race’. But more important to the young Marshall than the testimonies of the page were the stories she heard in the kitchen of her brownstone ...”