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“... to good use or to bad. Take Liane de Pougy, ‘celebrated cascadeuse of the Belle Epoque’, as Anita Brookner has described her. She was, for most of her life, one of the most beautiful and elegant women in France, had a triumphant career as a courtesan (‘the nation’s Liane’), married in her late thirties a Romanian prince – which didn’t ...”

“... on is a sequel to A Start in Life (1970 – not to be confused with a novel of the same title by Anita Brookner). In the earlier book Michael Cullen left working-class Nottingham for the metropolis, fell into the proverbial bad company, and ended up as a convicted gold-smuggler. Now, having been abandoned by his wife after ten years of idleness in the ...”

“... emptiness has considerable relative appeal. There are moments when one might almost be in an early Anita Brookner novel, shuddering at the cruelty of the laughing world – were it not for the sensation that one might almost be in Mansfield Park or The Wings of the Dove instead. Strongest of all is the illusion that one is still reading one or more likely ...”

“... replacement doesn’t mean you have to retire to a private nunnery, like some wilted daffodil in Anita Brookner declining the solace of an after-dinner mint. Late-life celibacy is no automatic character-improver or cleansing agent: Sukie had imagined before turning old that quirks – bad traits and mannerisms – would fall away, once the need to make ...”

“... laws very weak, which allowed Huysmans to express the full scale of his rage and contempt. As Anita Brookner put it, ‘his judgments on his contemporaries were not unlike the humours of an invalid, his view of the world as subjective as that of a patient in a hospital bed.’ His misanthropy gave him much less pleasure then than it does us ...”

“... say that someone now was flavoured with the essences belonging to, for example, Peter Ackroyd, Anita Brookner, William Boyd, Anthony Burgess and Peter Hall. This is typical, alas. First repetition: Kenneth has left Paris, even though his father has promised to introduce him to the ‘agent who had forced Tsvetaeva’s husband to work for the ...”

“... do in life, do they? I stood debating this with myself, and saying come now, come now, what would Anita Brookner do? Then I saw something move, above me; just a faint stir of the air, against the prevailing fug. One eye was now malfunctioning badly, and there were jagged holes in the world to the left of my head, so I had to turn my whole body to be sure ...”

“... freedom and autonomy. In her study of French Romantic painting, Romanticism and Its Discontents, Anita Brookner reminds us how vital to the period are principled acts of negation: ‘Romanticism is essentially about dissidence, about rejection, about protest, about breaking the old rules but only incidentally establishing new ones.’ There is no space ...”

“... and idiom. The central one is a lonely, depressive woman called Kristýna. She might be one of Anita Brookner’s heroines, except that she is too beautiful. Klíma writes extremely well about women; and if he is not quite as subtle as Brookner, that may be because he is so very keen to put across his message, that ...”

“... the book. He thought it had probably been exploded. ‘Exploded?’ said the Queen. ‘But it was Anita Brookner.’ The young man, who seemed remarkably undeferential, said security may have thought it was a device. The Queen said: ‘Yes. That is exactly what it is. A book is a device to ignite the imagination.’ The footman said: ‘Yes, maam.’ It ...”