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“... that she wants her writing to be ‘very direct, fat-free, efficient’, and the translations by Holly James and Lauren Elkin are faithful to her aim. But the staccato prose, the weird punctuation and Debré’s reliance on endless lists wears you down. The provocation stops being shocking and leads nowhere: ‘I understood the violence of men’; ‘I ...”

“... as much as it does the world of Capote. And that is one of the book’s strengths: Plimpton, like James Boswell, is an enthusiast for the world he is conjuring; he knows it well, knows all the figures in the carpet; the people are for the most part his acquaintances too, and his way of arranging their words is bent by his own understanding of how it all ...”

“... Maurice Bishop. Now there is a rumour that Austin and Coard’s party is planning to infiltrate St James (a tiny island, four miles to the south of Grenada), intending to use it as a base for their subversive activities in the region. It’s thought that a landing has been planned for Christmas Eve and the action of Black Marina is taken up with this ...”

“... It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its anxieties and lunacies are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.As a child Henry Rider Haggard was believed to be stupid: his father told him he was destined to ...”

“... were not encouraged and houseguests out of the question. ‘We held off from each other,’ Holly, their only child, recalled in Souvenirs and Prophecies (1977), her edition of the young Stevens’s journals; ‘one might say that my father lived alone.’Yet Church was right: Elsie was central to Stevens’s poethood, although she refused to read his ...”

“... And something about the folksy cadences of Cage’s caressing enunciation of the name Sera recalls James Stewart. Henry Coster’s 1950 movie Harvey features Stewart playing another of Hollywood’s charming, indulged drunks, Elwood, a harmless nobody with a ten-foot rabbit friend that nobody else can see. Elwood is as matter-of-fact about his rabbit as Ben is ...”

“... vantage of the choppy sea. In Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-85 (2003), James McCourt described the mid-century gay bars, cinemas, nightclubs, salons, restaurants and tea rooms as a ‘roman fleuve … far richer and far less verbal than anything described in Ulysses’. Unfortunately, as McCourt noted, this great living novel was ...”

“... cross-examinations hadn’t. Three days later, after all its major advertisers pulled out, James Murdoch announced that that Sunday’s edition of the News of the World would be its last. Next stop, the Leveson Inquiry. The Guardian had hit on the particular magic of sound recording: its power to conjure up a voice that wasn’t there. The first ...”

“... ever referred in this passage only to ‘those cords’, as the Quarto has it, making the cords ‘holly’ (holy) only later: the metaphor surely needs ‘holy’ to do its work, and one might think it had been there from the beginning. But the only editorial comment on ‘holly’ is by way of defending it as a spelling of ...”

“... spirit watching the car go. Malick’s first movie, Badlands (1973), is narrated by a girl of 15, Holly (Sissy Spacek). She and her dog are in her wrought-iron bed as she starts telling the story: ‘My mother died of pneumonia when I was just a kid. My father kept their wedding cake in the freezer for ten whole years. After the funeral he gave it to the ...”

“... Southern liar with a bit of individuality and a sense that she can’t go home again. She’s not Holly Golightly or Blanche DuBois, she’s not Sue-Ellen Ewing from Dallas or the women in The Real Housewives of Atlanta. AnnieLee is different because she is a survivor caught up in the pornography of her own abuse. You think she’s a person in charge of her ...”

“... rented houses in ever more outré parts of town: at Worlds End, or even Fulham. Outside London, as James Lees-Milne observed, ‘the country-house way of life as some of us have known it’ would never be revived. Some debs’ parents diversified, opened their houses to the public or turned them into businesses. The Duke of Bedford put a jukebox and a milk bar ...”

“... christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and ...”

“... James Bond was a well-known ornithologist. His Birds of the West Indies is an unusually rich source of names. According to Bond, the Sooty Tern is also known as the Egg Bird; Booby; Bubí; Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work ...”

“... a marketing tag, not a manifesto – caused a stir when it was published in the US in June. James Wood reviewed it at length in the New Yorker. Heti, he said, ‘may well have identified a central dialectic of 21st-century postmodern being’, but he also complained that her ‘prose is what one might charitably call basic’. The radical feminist ...”