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“... should all these babies pick on me?’ she wonders. After her son – Sandro in the novel, Julian in real life – was born Comyns terminated her next pregnancy. Abortion was still illegal and expensive. She and John begged the money from friends and, when there were complications, Comyns couldn’t go to hospital ‘because we would have all gone to ...”

“... only disability is that idealism must fail in the end: the world refuses to be transformed. In ‘Julian and Maddalo’ Shelley deals with his misgiving by giving it a separate hearing. Keach aptly refers to ‘Julian’s belief in the power of mind to dissolve and transform all impediments to ideal self-realisation, and ...”

“... a false narrative, a doorstep is smeared with shit, a dead cat is found hanging from the bell-pull, the words assassins and a mort are daubed on the shop’s blind. The police are only half-helpful: as one investigating officer says to another, ‘It smells of Kraut in here.’ The Krulls decide – not inaccurately – that Hans is the bringer, or ...”

“... distinguished by the most alliterative opening sentences I have ever read’. (‘Boom! went the bell of St Botolph’s, bidding her boys from book and board. Clang! came the curfew of Carfax, calling the citizens from counter and cloth-yard.’) From time to time Bernard would show up in Sussex and bark orders in ‘his military voice’ – he had others ...”

“... He follows the ploughmen, throwing clods of earth at the crows; he minds turkeys and does a little bell-ringing. Flaubert awards such activities a paragraph, and then summarises the consequences of this pre-adolescent life in two short sentences which he pointedly sets out as a separate paragraph: ‘Aussi poussa-t-il comme un chêne. Il acquit de fortes ...”

“... on equal terms. So, too, with the slightly more ambiguously gendered Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. As in surgery, literary sex change is an ugly operation and female chauvinists must rejoice to see a complete turn of the wheel in those areas of fiction where the practice is still necessary. When the Texan six-footer Tom Huff wished to make it big with a ...”

“... them with contempt.’ Here was the recruiting ground for the shock-troops of Thatcherism. Tim Bell, an advertising man who came up in this elevator, had rejected higher education because ‘the students were all blokes in duffel coats, listening to trad jazz and being irritating.’ It was a decision he never regretted. ‘The universities sidelined ...”

“... and rather frightening when people ignore, or don’t understand, jokes made at their expense. Julian Barnes once wrote a salutary essay on this, recalling the great Monty Python sketch about an obscure island completely inhabited by men sounding and looking like Alan Whicker. They paced to and fro, droning horribly and trailing microphones. It was, as ...”

“... to the ‘Picture Palace’ in her diaries and wrote an essay on ‘The Cinema’ in 1926. Clive Bell wrote two articles on cinema in the 1920s; the Hogarth Press published two pamphlets on film by the music critic Eric Walter White; and Roger Fry, in ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’ (1909), mentioned that it was only when he watched a ‘cinematograph’ that ...”

“... substance muttering to a dead animal sat down next to them on the Tube or rang their front-door bell? Among the new stars and saints to have emerged since the death of Beuys and Warhol is Jeff Koons. He is said to have been a commodity broker. But then he arranged new vacuum-cleaners in a perspex case and sold them to Charles Saatchi. ‘It is my ...”

“... least innocent amusement.’ Shelley was aware of his reputation for high-minded solemnity – ‘Julian is rather serious,’ he said of his self-portrait in ‘Julian and Maddalo’, a poem of exquisitely high spirits that breathes his gratitude for Byron’s friendship and good humour. ‘Perhaps no one will believe in ...”

“... and stays fucked for the next five thousand years.’)His last novel, Purity (2015), featured a Julian Assange-ish anti-corruption activist, which allowed Franzen to go whole hog on the rottenness of techno-capitalism. When James Meek reviewed the novel for the LRB (24 September 2015), he argued that too much of it read like ‘extracts from workaday ...”

“... It is also a little odd of her to suppose that such businessmen as J.D. Allcroft, Sir Isaac Bell and Lord Armstrong (a newly created peer, and therefore quite properly middle-class according to Macleod’s definition) were slipping from the aristocratic embrace because they erected vast new country houses for themselves rather than buying old ones. On ...”

“... and everyone in the household tiptoed around him in the a.m. while he worked, until he rang the bell, his cursory unspoken cue, a servant would run up and hand him a glass of water, which he’d drink, and a newspaper, which he scanned. Then he’d pound on the wall, his mother would come and sit and converse with him, a happy helpmate, lunch, a long ...”

“... ever in Chipping Camden.’ This is all we’re allowed to see. ‘Is this frustrating?’ Julian Barnes asked in his introduction to the 2013 edition. ‘Yes. Is it unfair? A little. Is it calculated? Exactly so.’Fitzgerald’s working papers, held at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, reveal hints of the future she imagined for Chiara and ...”