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“... In Michael Korda’s Curtain a thinly disguised Laurence Olivier puts at risk his marriage to a thinly disguised Vivien Leigh by having an affair with (stop me if you’ve heard this one) a no less thinly disguised Danny Kaye. Well! Well? As a piece of writing, the novel is aimed with charming accuracy at the station bookstall trade, where it should thrive ...”

“... all at once, of course, but slowly and painfully, as these biographies of George Sanders and Rex Harrison confirm, amid binges of mingled self-seeking and self-obliteration. Along the way, idolatry brings out the bully in us all, and provokes rage at so much unbridled permission – which isn’t love, which isn’t the love we were after. We are more ...”

“... influence on today’s literary scene, is called gently into question by each of these writers. Carey Harrison, with ostensibly the second (although in fact the first) volume of what looks set to become a monumental tetralogy, puts pressure on the boundaries of the form by insisting that it absorb a near-infinity of characters, events and incidental ...”

“... The Child; or with the intriguing dottiness, the peculiar, slightly mad interior landscape, which Carey Harrison brings to the ramshackle house and garden and aging characters of I never killed my German. This last, like Shirley Gee’s Typhoid Mary, delves as deep as MacNeice did into a central character, and deeper into perplexed, irritated central ...”

“... Health Service alone, it would win hands down. 29 May. A letter from N. at Oxford saying that John Carey thinks my ‘Kafka at Las Vegas’ too ‘ruminative and ambling’ to qualify for a university-sponsored lecture. N., though finding it ‘a good read’, tends to agree and suggests an undergraduate society might leap at the prospect. Or I could take my ...”

“... phrases, with the extraordinary career of Alexandre Dumas, though England was not far behind with Harrison Ainsworth and G.P.R. James. It was at this point that the historical novel started to acquire its modern ambiguity. Most literary genres have included a variety of registers, and as the Russian Formalists always emphasised, their vitality has typically ...”

“... appealing to outrage among the local, white community over the allocation of council ... Dr George Carey, the Archbish ... ’ The owner of the radio was shaking his head, twisting the aerial. ‘This’ll be the start of it,’ he said, ‘they’ll all be at each other’s throats.’ We sat smoking, listening to the reaction of the Archbishop and the news ...”