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“... The title of Tao Lin’s sixth book and second novel is an act of mild provocation. Richard Yates belongs to a biography, not a novel – certainly not one in which Yates himself doesn’t appear. One character in the book steals a copy of The Easter Parade; another reads Disturbing the Peace; a third tells an anecdote about a reading Yates once gave ...”

“... to life, unusual in a man in his late forties. The hero of After My Fashion is a self-portrait. Richard Storm has returned to Sussex from Paris, where he has made a name for himself with his critical appreciations of modern French writers. The first man he meets is a young painter, Robert Canyot, a traditionalist who thinks ...”

“... On the evening of 10 March 1969, Richard Crossman, Harold Wilson’s new Secretary of State for Social Services (‘SSSS? Impossible!’ Crossman wrote in his diary), reached into one of his three ministerial red boxes to find a long report by a still rather obscure Conservative barrister. Geoffrey Howe had entered Parliament in 1964, only to lose his seat when Wilson increased Labour’s majority from four to 95 in 1966 ...”

“... is utterly without the factitiousness – the I’ll-pretend-to-write-a-novel-and-you-pretend-to-read-it – that seems so current in England. In the end – though this is bizarre – he is probably a religious novelist, whose theme is salvation, though I’d be surprised if he’s actually used the word anywhere. Most tantalisingly, he is still better than ...”

“... Early in this century, people who read Lytton Strachey, and liked to think of themselves as modern, prided themselves on lacking a sense of Sin. Nowadays people who read Michel Foucault, and who use the term ‘Post Modern’ with a straight face, pride themselves on not believing in Truth ...”

“... Charles Doyle’s biography of Richard Aldington opens so readily at the 24 excellent photographs with which the book is illustrated that the temptation to look at them, before one gets involved with the text, is irresistible. The series starts with a rather determined-looking boy with cap and striped jersey, holding a football ...”

“... I first met Richard Cobb at my Balliol interview one late evening in December 1970. The encounter was, by any measurement, a failure. In the ‘interests’ section of my entrance form, I had made the mistake of declaring membership of the Committee for Freedom in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea. Cobb, who was plainly bored at having to conduct interviews after dinner, asked me brusquely which liberation group in Angola I supported and why ...”

“... stories, written in a script that is for him unfamiliar, in a language that he can ‘hardly read’, and yet he finds the letters ‘intimate’. Both English and Bengali retain a certain exteriority – the Bengali in which so many of Chaudhuri’s characters think and speak, and the English in which he records them. In all three of Chaudhuri’s ...”

“... from rivers choking with a glut of water on the plain, and draining towards the sea. When I first read Gilgamesh I was reminded of Pliny’s account of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and wondered whether the description of black, darkened skies might prove consistent with a volcanic eruption. Stephanie Dalley, the doyenne of Akkadian scholars, reminded ...”

“... of geological succession. The geology of the Mediterranean islands is complex and difficult to ‘read’. Had it been simpler, geological science might have got off to a much earlier ...”

“... back in the Fifties were mostly men of action, like Tarzan, Berry and Biggles (though I did read Worrals books too). These were nonchalantly modest, clean-limbed fellows ready for a scrap, if there was a chance of delivering a knockout punch to the half-shaven chin of Evil. I was reassured to discover that such fictitious protagonists had their ...”

“... of the theatre or to have had an intimate knowledge of its day-to-day workings, so it is hard to read his account of the ‘end’ of ‘the Court’ as anything other than sentimentality. As he saw it, his ‘arcadian’ period closed with his production of The Seagull. It was designed by Jocelyn Herbert, who had defined their visual idiom; Peggy ...”

“... arts’. Yet, when so many solemn novels are prolix, esoteric, or dispiriting, it’s a relief to read eventful tales of suspense, surprise, excitement, mystery and catharsis. E.M. Forster was wrong to deprecate the ‘story’. Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky had no such misgivings. Does this mean ceasing to discriminate between literature and ...”

“... and although he cracked, he never broke into madness. The prisoners at Vincennes were free to read and write all they wished, and Sade’s extensive personal library was crucial in preserving the core of his identity. Books further excited the ideas that made sleep elusive. Insomniacs are as big liars as fishermen, but whatever his exaggerations, Sade was ...”

“... There is, as Richard Graves points out, no general biography of Housman. The books about him by Laurence Housman, Grant Richards and Percy Withers are valuable, because these men knew Housman and could describe him: but they are not biographies. George Watson’s A.E. Housman: A Divided Life is more like one, but it is not quite one; of Norman Marlow and Maude Hawkins I say nothing ...”