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“... complaint that his analyst, Masud Khan, was himself a patient and confidant of Winnicott – Robert Rodman even conjectures a homosexual attraction – all the time he was treating Godley in such extraordinary ways.* And Godley’s stepdaughter was another of Winnicott’s patients.Khan was by any standards and in any company a wild and perhaps even a ...”

“... In Motherless Brooklyn (1999), four Brooklyn orphans are taken up by a low-level crook called Frank Minna, who runs a detective agency. Frank is then murdered, leaving the orphans to find out what happened to him. The style is hardboiled, the pace unflagging, the plot bewildering; yet this isn’t an ordinary detective ...”

“... it comes at the weary end of a line that stretches through books by Peter Blake, Brent Brolin, Robert Venturi and others right back to Jane Jacobs’s epoch-breaking attack on Le Corbusier in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, over twenty years ago. Of course, all this has guaranteed Wolfe a readership whose anti-modern reflexes had been well ...”

“... in interpretation. If you add to the list other works wholly or partly biographical, such as Frank MacShane’s of 1965, and various memoirs such as Douglas Goldring’s South Lodge, you have to agree that Ford the man has been capable of sustaining interest. The record as to his work is not quite so impressive; of his eighty-odd books not many are ...”

“... be entirely about himself, as he sat there in his familiar room writing them. He greatly admired Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves, until he heard that Harris told lies. He might have admired Rousseau and eventually been disillusioned again. Not that he read Rousseau; his reading was scattered and he didn’t seem to understand that his troubles were not ...”

“... Robert Martin’s book is not one of those literary biographies that reshuffle a familiar narrative and perhaps add a few bits of new information or conjecture. It is a full-scale life, founded on primary sources, many of them previously unpublished. As the first major biography since Hallam Tennyson’s pious memoir of 1897, it has obvious importance ...”

“... Blasting the past has long been a habit of avant-garde artists and malcontent youth, but anti-passéisme has made small headway in the learned professions. They are keen on roots – for example, the roots of the modern in late 19th-century art, and its roots in romanticism; the cardinal assumption is that everything really starts earlier than you might think ...”

“... Not long ago I, too, was browsing in the Huntingdon files and found a large box of letters from Robert Conquest to Amis; the other side of the correspondence was missing, and what was there contained lots of limericks and few confessional items for the use of any future biographer of Conquest, possibly Salwak. It seemed somehow a slightly dingy way of ...”

“... exchanges,’ Hughes says in one of his more oracular moments, ‘we may perhaps look forward to Robert Kayll’s attack on the East India trade.’* Human sacrifice and counting (and accounting) are, then, interacting subjects of this book. Even in Greek tragedy counting denotes a culture of order that the use of human sacrifice may destroy. In Euripides ...”

“... Northrop Frye celebrated the literary rediscovery of Scripture in The Great Code, and now Frank Kermode and Robert Alter, two critics who have given a new rigour and seriousness to the ‘Bible as literature’ movement, have brought together a constellation of literary and Biblical specialists, from both sides of ...”

“... trite’; ‘a true autobiography of a second-rate soul’. Henry bolted again, this time to join Frank, his younger brother, who was growing tomatoes in Guernsey. They impressed OUP with a translation of Lucian, and from then on were virtually full-time employees of the Press. Next came The King’s English (1906), which provided some of the content for the ...”

“... so alike.’ Lubow charts rumours that ‘Doon and Marvin were sleeping together,’ quoting Mary Frank, the wife of the photographer Robert Frank (with whom he did a phone interview): ‘It was so horrible that it was always unspoken but understood.’ He also quotes the photographer Saul Leiter (whom he interviewed ...”

“... Robert Hughes begins his autobiography, as he began his recent book on Goya, by describing the road accident in Western Australia that nearly killed him in 1999, and his subsequent ordeals in hospital and in court. In this new book he expands on the treatment he received from Australian journalists and in particular on the allegation made by a local reporter that he had referred to a prosecution lawyer descended from Indian migrants as a ‘curry muncher’, which was then repeated by a succession of other journalists ...”

“... misunderstood the conventions of exposition employed by the accused. The Nobel Prize physicist Robert Millikan has been accused of suppressing experiments which did not bear out his theory of the unitary charge on the electron, since his notebooks contain accounts of experiments he did not publish. It has been denied that this was an instance of deception ...”

“... I remember the pleasure of my first reading of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems when it came out in 1964 in a City Lights edition uniform (except that it was blue and red, not black and white) with Ginsberg’s Howl, Kaddish and Reality Sandwiches. Two years later O’Hara was dead, killed by a dune buggy at an all-night party on Fire Island ...”