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“... unlike his father, is able to feel free on so little freedom. The passing respect of a black porter suffices, because such gestures are essential to Vidia’s sense of life, but not to his sense of self. Pa’s political metabolism is, by comparison, inefficient; his sense of freedom too clumsy and massive to be nourishing. There are too many wants to ...”

“... plus a smattering of tourists had much good to say about Britain’s capital. Literary folk like James and Conrad slipped into the illusionary language of the dark sublime. London was dismal, blackened, sick, cruel and unplanned, concurred the charitable and the analytic; the sooner the authorities could draw the working population and their smokestacks out ...”

“... collaborators) that he declared he was giving up theatre to write mystery novels. He rallied after James Lapine, a new collaborator, suggested doing something about Seurat and his painting of a Sunday afternoon at la Grande Jatte. That show ran for 604 performances, yet its ten Tony nominations led only to design prizes – there really is a Broadway faction ...”

“... What are we saying when we say someone has ‘gone out of their mind’? The thing about going out of your mind is that the mind is still there; you can go back. You haven’t lost your mind. You’ve just gone out of it. The Russians use the same phrase. The Russian adjective meaning ‘crazy’, which is the same as the noun for ‘insane person’, is sumasshedshy, literally ‘who was going out of their mind ...”

“... of the process of writing, she’s building a canvas as well as she is putting on the paint,’ James Taylor, another conquest, explained. ‘It’s never straight on.’ Mitchell’s lyrical indirection, the habit of thinking against conventional tropes, is an extension of what she calls her ‘perverse need for originality’, a manifestation of a ...”

“... the National Library and turning schizophrenics into the street. Forced to survive as a hospital porter, Caritat, accompanied by a garrulous owl of Minerva, finally makes his escape over the border in search of Egalitaria, a land which may prove either a heuristic fiction or a historical possibility. On this wistfully suspended note, the novel shifts out of ...”

“... as a governess in Russia, accepting hardship and insecurity as the price of independence. Agnes Porter earned the respect and affection of her wealthy employers and fought hard, and finally successfully, to secure a long promised and richly earned pension. Ellen Weeton’s life was blighted, but it was marriage with a violent man, not her work as a ...”

“... writers and artists, but the one that posterity will really value is her interview with ‘Sir James Savile’ for the IoS, on the occasion of his belated knighthood, 22 July 1990. ‘People were terribly shocked when I asked [him] if it was true that he liked little girls … Of course he denied it. But at least by posing the question I’d alerted ...”

“... intelligence required to make proper use of that knowledge’. Nice work if you can do it, as Cole Porter didn’t quite say. Kermode is not Housman and not a diviner. But he does devote much exquisite intelligence to matters of divination – even and especially of secular affairs. He would like to believe we could do without such obliquities. He is touched ...”

“... What constituted his cosmopolitanism and its limits? How much do we need to know about noggins and porter in order to reread his books? What ruined his art? Brian O’Nolan’s life is both surprising and unremarkable. He was born in Strabane on the border of Donegal and Tyrone in 1911. Both his parents were comfortably middle-class: his mother, Agnes, from ...”

“... she later recorded it): ‘The best-dressed woman in New York.’ This is not the sort of ambition James Wood had in mind when he recently suggested in the LRB (4 January) that we owe half of English literature to the aspirant mother. Of course, those sensitive and ambitious women are usually the mothers of lower-class males; and in Wharton’s case, as in ...”

“... an obsessive labour, a way of life’. Her artless title is taken from a letter Helen Lowe-Porter wrote to Thomas Mann after she became his English translator. She was, she said later, an ‘unknown instrument … which … must … serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the marketplace until times ...”

“... Marías writes the kind of old-fashioned, speculative prose we associate with Proust and Henry James, all qualifications and revisions, no assertion that can’t be infinitely embroidered or unravelled. But he also deals in violence, historical and personal, and in the movie titles, politicians, brand-names and underwear we connect with a quite different ...”

“... Ian Paisley, and to know or guess the parts played in the history of the North by ‘Munro, Hope, Porter and McCracken’. Maybe they know that ‘sheugh’ means ditch: a paragraph in John Braidwood’s The Ulster Dialect Lexicon mentions it as ‘that Ulster favourite sheugh’, and reports that it is ‘recorded all over Scotland from Aberdeen to Galloway ...”

“... characters got a tick if they were on the side of liberty (Cromwell, Chatham), a cross (Charles I, James II) if they held up the march of progress. Because he went in for active royalty and made some attempt to govern on his own account rather than leaving it to the Whig aristocracy, George III had been written up as a villain and a clumsy tyrant. This view ...”