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“... we do not find among the pinched ironies of much contemporary fiction. One advantage of writing short books is that you can write a lot of them. Emma Tennant’s last novel Queen of Stones appeared only a year ago. It now reappears in paperback. On the archetypal theme of lost children, it combines the factual and circumstantial with vision and nightmare ...”

“... keep the conversation light and flatter the host. Xenophon introduces us to one such character, Philip, in his Symposium, a work of historical fiction written in c.365 BC. Philip stands on the threshold and announces that he is a laughter-maker (gelotopoios) and jokes that he came uninvited because he thought it was more ...”

“... who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long and crowned with honours,’ and his title suggests a connection between death, destiny and Englishness. Faulks was born in 1953 and was thus just 12 years old ...”

“... Claudia Roth Pierpont met Philip Roth at a birthday party in 2002. She was a fan, but managed not to alienate him with clumsy enthusiasm. A couple of years later he sent her a photocopy of a newspaper article he thought she might be interested in. They met for coffee and became more relaxed with each other. Later he recruited her as a member of the small rotating committee of friends, an editorial micro-minyan, to whom he sent drafts of his books ...”

“... Friedrich, the young protagonist of Philip Hensher’s third novel, Pleasured, lives the sort of dismal half-life that was possible in Berlin before the Wall came down, the period when West Germans received subventions just for taking up residence there. It was a city that attracted the very old, who needed to bulk up their pensions, and the young, who wanted to study or just vegetate – or to escape compulsory military service (another advantage of living in Berlin ...”

“... after all, is a mode modern readers (like Chaucer’s) can cope with. Fictive immediacy may short-circuit by obliterating the mysterious distance of other lives and times. The carefully invented document, on the other hand, the slightly faked and not implausibly revealing memoir, can, when rightly framed, hold moral and formal satisfactions. Such a ...”

“... are some of the closest non-Latin parallels that come to mind. As in his splendid anti-Homeric short story ‘Like the Night’, Carpentier pungently conveys the squalor and melancholy of grand, violent projects which go off the boil: the failed, guilt-crushed revolutionary recalls unconvincingly that ‘everything had been just, heroic, and sublime in the ...”

“... gradually emerged out of confusion and controversy, how, if we confine ourselves to relatively short time periods, there may seem to be no consistent direction in the change of biological ideas, but that a general trend emerges from studies of the longue durée. Those historians who are convinced that we can make no sense of the idea of scientific progress ...”

“... Some time ago, Philip Roth remarked that his novels investigate ‘people in trouble’. Though much about his work has changed over the years, his fictional landscapes are still littered with human wreckage. Rage and lust, anxiety and melancholy are the dominant emotions, and all human impulses, even loyalty and affection, tend to career wildly out of control ...”

“... letter P. It opens on a hinge, like a locket, and the image inside shows the life of the apostle Philip in six tondos. Apparently it was a talisman of Philip the Handsome (1478-1506), ruler of the Burgundian Netherlands. The identification between the duke and his holy namesake was guaranteed by the magic of a single ...”

“... as we could see flames coming from the tails of them, also a light in the nose.’According to Philip Ziegler, in London at War (1995), when waves of Hitler’s first Vergeltungswaffe, the V-1, began hitting the city, most people – the initially elated gunners were the exception – worked out right away what kind of weapon they were. They called them ...”

“... for Art Spiegelman’s Maus. And it has happened to science fiction, where the anointed author is Philip K. Dick. When he died in 1982, Dick was a cult figure, admired unreservedly in the science fiction subculture, and in the American counterculture as a chronicler of psychedelia and fringe religion. By then he had published more than thirty novels, most of ...”

“... Barnes later said that she loved her grandmother Zadel ‘as a child usually loves its mother’, Philip Herring quotes letters to her from Zadel which say things like ‘Pink Tops are simply gasping with love!’ (‘Pink Tops’ are Zadel’s breasts) and feature cartoons of naked women on top of one another. He also claims that Barnes may have been raped ...”

“... good internationalists, communists, socialists, liberals and social democrats’. Her father, Philip Toynbee, novelist, poet and one-time communist, was for many years chief book reviewer for the Observer. His father was the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, author of the twelve-volume A Study of History; his mother, Rosalind, was the daughter of the classical ...”

“... Philip Larkin’s lines have taken hold over the years, calling to them the confirmatory evidence of family histories, uniting disparate and apparently unconnected offspring under their aegis. Few authors in recent fiction have addressed themselves to the universal family romance with Caroline Blackwood’s bleakness ...”