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“... cannot help itself. When Fevvers, the Victorian Cockney aerialist and performer, discovers as a child that she has wings, she is told: ‘Oh my little one, I think you must be the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound to the ground.’ The source of ...”

“... He announced to David Selznick that ‘a delightful book’ called To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was ‘going to be a great success’. He himself, he wrote, was the model for the character Dill, being a childhood friend of the author’s. The first letter in Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote sets the tone. The date is not ...”

“... various disorderly responses to the savagery of life’. But then another New York Times reviewer, Lee Siegel, called it a ‘chaotic, rambling, repetitive and parochial’ book in a ‘plodding translation’ – a ‘shapeless lump’ compared to Singer’s best stories, which are ‘hard diamonds of perfection’. Reviewers have also speculated about ...”

“... managing director in 1982 she lavished care on her authors: Iris Murdoch, Hilary Mantel, Hermione Lee and other Bloomsbury biographers and historians. She published Angela Carter’s last, whirling novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991). (It was around this time she accepted my novel The Lost Father and brought me over from ...”

“... member of the Little Rascals, becomes the sellout’s slave. (The Little Rascals were the child stars of Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedy shorts in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.) ‘Massa,’ Hominy says, ‘sometimes we just have to accept who we are and act accordingly. I’m a slave. That’s who I am. It’s the role I was born to play. A slave who ...”

“... cone. A drawer full of images was spread out before her. After a little while, according to Lee Server’s new biography, she ‘kind of shrugged, and she said: “Jeez . . . From the way people went on so, I thought I was better-looking than that.”’ There’s an essay to be written on the disadvantages of physical superiority, and Ava Gardner ...”

“... at home with two strange females he could never hope to understand’. Her mother ‘looked like Lee Miller if Lee Miller had been a bedroom drunk’. But snark is tiring. The narrator tells Dr Tuttle that she can’t sleep, when she is in fact a ‘somnophile’ clocking 12 hours a night. (Sleep was the one thing she and ...”

“... chocolate biscuits, Moore fell sick himself, and would spend long periods in hospital. His other child was taken into care; Moore was eventually diagnosed with diabetes, which would later require his leg to be amputated. When he began to write again Larkin-loving editors wouldn’t touch his poetry: his only publication after 1950 had been a botanical ...”

“... wit: Those two sketches . . . both seemed dreadful to me – the most vicious of all forms of child worship enshrined in slovenly language of the most emetic sentimentality . . . followed by a lot of painstaking but washy verse masquerading as poetry . . . I felt I wanted a whole page adv. in the next issue explaining that I have nothing whatever to do ...”

“... Odyssey, Penelope lies awake at night longing for Odysseus and thinks of Aedon, who wails for the child she has slain. For Ovid, the nightingale’s song was that of a raped and mutilated woman. In the poetry of the 13th-century Franciscan John Peckham, the nightingale foresees the hour of her own death, singing from the top of a tree and descending ever ...”

“... A 12-year-old girl with a wounded foot and an ulcerated mouth guards Mallory, armed with a rusty Lee Enfield that is to figure talismanically throughout the subsequent story. Mallory tries to escape, and the girl pulls the trigger. At this point it is plausible to assume an Incident-at-Owl-Creek twist. But as the written story tells us, the firing pin or ...”

“... gestures. Under what circumstances, if any, should the cloning of human beings be permitted? Lee Silver in his admirable book understands that the most important issue doesn’t centre on cloning but on the possibilities opened up by a field he calls ‘reprogenetics’. Reprogenetics draws on knowledge derived from developing techniques of assisted ...”

“... the abandoned shell of Fort Point in San Francisco, this fierce and frightened man, looking like Lee Marvin. The fat parcel of money he has been demanding throughout the film is at his feet. All he has to do is pick it up. Instead, he fades into the darkness. What kind of movie is Point Blank? And what kind of book is this, written by the man who made it?It ...”

“... his escape into the army, to serve first in Palestine as a peacekeeper, then with his old Lee-Enfield as a sniper in Malaya, from where he returned home – out of the fire, into the frying-pan – and joined the Gardaí. The case he is finally summoned to, by numerous ineluctable internal and external factors, and so much to his surprise that he ...”

“... recompense was vast.I need to declare an interest here: a coming to terms with my own past. As a child of the German Jewish diaspora I lived in some intimacy with the Wiedergutmachung, the German reparations. There was a lot of talk in my family and among our friends about finding documents that would establish eligibility and prove damages; there was a lot ...”