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“... Fanny and the book. Austen’s own stance towards both her and Emma was protective but ironic, and Anne Elliot she called ‘almost too good for me’. It might be said that all are less heroines (though they do have heroic qualities) than natural forces which serve the writer’s need in her hard romance: presences whose reflective feelings come to be the ...”

“... hamming up roles that offer them nothing but clichés. The actors who are superb are all those – Anne Archer, Madeleine Stowe, Julianne Moore, Matthew Modine, Frances McNormand – who get a chance to underact, to play through despair and calamity as if they were just everyday weather. There is a moment in the film which is pure Altman, as good as anything ...”

“... left Islamabad on 1 July, a day before the Independence Day party held by the US ambassador, Anne Patterson. Probably the most heavily guarded event in the global social calendar, this is the modern equivalent of the viceroy’s garden parties in old New Delhi. The leaders of the political, military and economic elite jostle with each other and with ...”

“... challenge in translating him is to capture the pleasure and the delicacy that exists alongside the frank and direct filth. The first line of his famous kissing poem, ‘Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus’ (Catullus 5), brought out the jaundiced civil servant in Sisson: it really doesn’t mean ‘Living, dear Lesbia, is useless without loving.’ The jussive ...”

“... said to myself Guillaume it is time that you came’). This trait Apollinaire in turn passed on to Frank O’Hara, who acknowledged the debt in ‘Memorial Day 1950’, in which O’Hara figures himself reading music by the light of ‘Guillaume Apollinaire’s clay candelabra’. Yet a note of uncertainty not really found in the American poets often pervades ...”

“... any scandal, allowing the writer to puff and genuflect and conceal his way to glory. Take Frank Kermode’s Not Entitled, a memoir typical of a generation of men who thought things were best said by not being said at all. Plante, however, is a throwback to the days of Barbara Skelton and the Comtesse de Boigne. In the years covered by his diary, he ...”

“... despair about fatherhood when he knew that its performance would help the career of his daughter, Anne, who was an artist. The skilful minimalism of her set designs contributed to its success at the Abbey. Early on, the marriage was fraught, because the ageing youth in Yeats had not got over Maud Gonne, and because Maud’s daughter, Iseult, was now of an age ...”

“... her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained the word ‘pardon’. Of the good people in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion we know nothing more than what is written; for before those works were published their author had been taken ...”

“... at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic analysis that marks the ...”

“... were drowned out by a host of detractors, from within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve ...”

“... In fact, in 1978, the year after Lowell’s death, Blackwood posted them to Lowell’s friend Frank Bidart in Boston. Bidart, Saskia Hamilton writes, ‘put the envelope under his bed, and later transferred it to the Houghton Library in Harvard, with a cover note stating that “This packet of letters belongs to the Estate of Robert Lowell, not to ...”

“... the only writer who has ever rewritten stories after they were published. I read somewhere that Frank O’Connor was constantly changing his stories long after they were in print. He went through about three different versions of his great story ‘Guests of the Nation’. For me, it was like conceiving a story and seeing it as unfinished business. The ...”

“... the Northern women writers such as Charlotte Elizabeth, Amanda McKittrick Ros, Frances Browne and Anne Crone, whose varieties of Unionism and feminism would have been intriguingly disruptive of the meta-narrative. Northern writing is otherwise well-represented. Tom Paulin edits a section on ‘Northern Protestant Oratory and Writing 1791-1985’, which ...”

“... girl-on-girl: ‘All three young women at the table watched Ava move towards the bar. Let’s be frank: Ava was wearing boot-cut jeans that afternoon and all three scrutinised and evaluated her arse as she went. Manda was looking for some avenue of criticism; but it was pretty clear there was absolutely none.’ This blokeish ‘frankness’ is also evident ...”

“... but these are really survival memoirs. A Child Called ‘It’ by Dave Pelzer, Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans initiated the genre in the 1990s. They were largely read for sentimental and/or sadomasochistic reasons, for their account of hardship overcome, regardless of their literary merit (Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work ...”