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“... who describe 17th-century England as a country ridden with class hatred, but 1688 bore it out. John Miller’s Seeds of Liberty, although emphasising the dependence of the Revolution on its acceptance by a broad and well-informed political nation, concedes that the nobles led and the people followed. A hundred years later the principle of deference looked ...”

“... say. It was the success of the competition that brought him up short. First had come The Gallery, John Horne Burns’s novel about the Allied occupation of Naples, which Heller admired. That gave him pause. Then Norman Mailer’s huge war novel, The Naked and the Dead, stopped him cold. Heller realised immediately that any war novel he was then likely to ...”

“... is closer to Henry James than to Genet.Snyder makes no reference to Purdy’s close contemporary John Horne Burns, whose 1947 novel, The Gallery, had negotiated a sure-footed path through the competing claims of directness and prudence (it became a bestseller). The gallery is the Galleria Umberto 1 in Naples, a monumental shopping arcade, at least ...”

“... people think I’m a monster.’ The biography he authorised and checked – Hitch by his friend John Russell Taylor – appeared two years before his death on 29 April 1980 to contradict this idea, and, for all its blandness and sparseness of reference, brought much information to light. Its blurb called it ‘the only serious biography of the man ...”

“... pairs two longish stories set in Scotland, David Craig’s ‘Jason and the Green Woman’ and John Murray’s ‘The Señor and the Celtic Cross’, which operate quite different ironies about the limits of civilised society. The latter story, told in a tormented parodic mélange of styles, recounts a tourist’s experience of sex, superstition and the ...”

“... and debased by the hollow consumerist ethic such criticism reflects, to appreciate the beauty of John Ford’s Westerns; he is pained by ‘the increasingly indignant audiences who consistently show that the future belongs to the very worst Z-movies, to the pictures that block off your vision and to the sounds that clout you across the ear’. Fourteen years ...”

“... us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each deserves the ...”

“... affected by Charles Maclean’s workmanship in plotting such horror out of forgetfulness. John Le Carré’s new book, The Little Drummer Girl, has an unhappy English actress with radical leanings recruited as an agent by the Israeli intelligence service in order to infiltrate a Palestinian terrorist network attacking Jews in Europe. The process of ...”

“... mostly American group made up by herself, Walter Berry, Howard Sturgis, Morton Fullerton, John Hugh Smith, Percy Lubbock and a few other initiates. She emphasises the man’s ‘quality of fun’, and her James is ‘the laughing, chaffing, jubilant yet malicious James’, not ‘the grave personage known to less intimate eyes’. Like the letters of ...”

“... life of fiction’. They see themselves as living in films, like Death Wish fan Bernard Goetz, or John W. Hinckley Jr thinking himself akin to Travis Bickle, the Taxi Driver: here Travis Bickle is the narrator’s son, and Thomson’s chapter on him acutely treats the ambiguous end of Scorsese’s film as a nightmarish, irreversible arrival on the screen ...”

“... John Updike’s unfailing geniality and fluent industry appear to get on a fair number of nerves, of which he’s slyly aware. (Is there anything he isn’t slyly aware of? That foxy grin conceals volumes.) When Updike was but a sprig, apprenticing at the New Yorker and carving out a little piece of Pennsylvania as his literary duchy, his gleaming facility was found suspect by some detractors, its satin finish the imposture of a fair-haired boy out to impress his elders with the fine flick of his exquisite perceptions and deflective modesty ...”

“... same kind of catalyst for a disturbed individual as Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver was for John W. Hinckley III. The incongruity that so morally intricate and oblique a work as James’s should be exploited only for a cruelly manipulative piece of chicanery counts dramatically, moreover: the sensitive Jamesian Elizabeth, threatened with death from ...”

“... of ‘Notes towards ... ’, on disarming criticism by pre-emptive apology. But in the words of John Wayne, ‘Sorry doesn’t get it done.’ Thus he writes, ‘(This really has the makings of a Mills & Boon)’ – but lets it stand. He inserts a footnote in a scene between Philip and his rival for Melissa: ‘It is difficult to render simultaneity in ...”

“... which could draw superstructurally on the digital resource. A model that comes to mind is Philip Horne’s ingenious Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999). A thirty-volume set of letters, even for the Master, is not on, so Horne sifted through James’s manuscript remains and printed a run of correspondence, with linking ...”

“... of China’s epochal stagnation. During the Great Exhibition of 1851, Charles Dickens and Richard Horne wrote a piece for Household Words that contrasted the wonders of the Crystal Palace with the quaintness of an accompanying display of artefacts from China at a gallery in Hyde Park Place. ‘It is very curious,’ Dickens and ...”