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“... from the Houston Post asked the bestselling author of the low-life and hilarious ‘adult’ short-story collection Someone like You who his favourite British writer was, he answered loftily: ‘Henry Green.’ Treglown thought the reason might have been that Dahl (who anyway loved a put-down) shared a friend with Green, the painter Matthew Smith, whose ...”

“... demons, often in obscure psychic concert with another man, dead or alive. Maxim kills Rebecca, Philip kills his cousin Rachel by an act of omission, and Julius, true to his overwrought foreign nature, wastes four women in all. These examples are taken from the novels, but the short stories, some very warped indeed, are ...”

“... Ball anchored the HMS Supply in Plymouth. It seems the ship was misnamed – supplies had been short on its latest voyage, and the crew had eaten some of the kangaroos they were carrying. Three unappetising ones survived, two of which were presented to George III. Here and there an animal exacted a paltry revenge. In 1768, two men were leading a bear up ...”

“... autobiography’ but says it’s OK to think of the book as ‘a collection of linked short stories, with essayistic detours’. That seems right. Sometimes there are invisible scare quotes, self-ironising or self-protective, around ‘Martin Amis’. At other times he seems to be addressing the reader in his own person. There’s no easy way of ...”

“... In 1613, at the height of the persecution of ‘egypcianos’ and ‘Moors’ in Spain under Philip III, Miguel de Cervantes published his story ‘La Gitanella’ (‘The Little Gypsy Girl’). One of his ‘Exemplary Novels’, it traced the adventures of a beautiful Gypsy called Preciosa. The orientalised, seductive child-woman with a ‘swarthy ...”

“... 1967 Gowon declared a state of emergency over the entire country, assuming ‘full powers for the short period necessary to carry out the measures which are now urgently required’. He also announced the creation of twelve states to replace the regions. The Eastern Region was broken into three, making the Igbo a majority in only one of them. Three days later ...”

“... he earned a living from the advertising agencies on Madison Avenue and shared an apartment with Philip Roth. In 1964 he designed the poster for Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. His pacifism and his posters against the war in Vietnam brought him to the attention of the FBI; he was blacklisted until 1993. He campaigned, too, on behalf of the civil rights ...”

“... now looks suspiciously like a one-man tradition. So standard an item in recent collections has the Philip Larkin Memorial Poem become that it now exists as a genre in its own right, like the limerick and the villanelle. Thus Ewart again:                             For us, he’s gonemuch loved, humane; that shyly gloomy ...”

“... mystery how they are going to deal with the problems we now know they have. To tweak a thought by Philip Roth, the mystery of the man who doesn’t know he is set up for mystery – that is every man’s mystery. The many mysteries boil down to three. There is the kind that can be solved: who planted the bomb? Will the travellers reach their destination? What ...”

“... his own need to reassure his parents, much got left out. In a series of interviews Hecht did with Philip Hoy in 1999, however, published in the Waywiser Press series ‘Between the Lines’, Hecht had more to say about what he had witnessed at Flossenbürg in 1945: When we arrived, the SS personnel had, of course, fled. Prisoners were dying at the rate of ...”

“... design: to stop Stalker. On the basis of his interim report Stalker has been appointed by Sir Philip Myers, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Police, to conduct a full inquiry into the part played by the RUC in the 1982 killings. Impatient to resume his task, he is frustrated by administrative obstacles which are put in his way: but finally decides to ...”

“... interviewer in 1969, ‘I am in reality no longer alive.’ Although he had managed to sell four short stories to the New Yorker during the intervening decades, the most eye-catching part of his post-Call It Sleep output was a short guide to setting up a home-butchering operation, written for a waterfowl trade magazine in ...”

“... Gospel According to Matthew (1964), which featured the philosopher Giorgio Agamben as the disciple Philip, the novelist Natalia Ginzburg as Mary of Bethany and Susanna, Pasolini’s mother, as the older Virgin Mary. A few years later, Pasolini wrote warmly about Morante’s Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini (1968), a dramatic poetry cycle which has just been ...”

“... to me here. The only other place I have seen the word ‘corpun’ in print is in the Letters of Philip Larkin. As a neologism, it is as ugly as any one could contrive, but as a salacious expression and – apparently – as a piece of authentic Englishry, it was very close to his core.)The key phrase in Captain Waterhouse’s distraught peroration above is ...”

“... from earlier fiction (they appear under their own names in the most recent collection of Apple’s short stories, Free Agents). No doubt the daughter is as charming and self-possessed in real life as she is in these pages, but too often she (or her brother, or Rocky, or Apple himself, or the dog) perfectly rounds out or caps a given chapter or exchange. What ...”