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“... George Hayim, candid homosexual masochist, globe-scampering self-gratifier, unabashed lifelong idler, one-book novelist, offers, for what it’s worth, his life story. Born in 1920, the son of an adulterous, wealthy Shanghai stockbroker whom he hated, and a Shanghai mother whom he adored, Hayim recalls an incident in his childhood when his father punished him for swearing by sticking a pin in his lip ...”

“... these are the relevant facts: this rubbish heap of details is the past, the London under London. Paul Sayer works as a staff nurse in a psychiatric hospital. The Comforts of Madness is an extended imaginary exposure to what the wretches under his care feel. Peter is a long-term catatonic patient, and the novel takes the form of his interior ...”

“... who have made names for themselves and written copiously while still in their late twenties are Paul Watkins, Paul Sayer and Louis de Bernières. Watkins had his first novel (Night over Day over Night) nominated for the Booker, and won the Encore Prize with his second. Sayer won ...”

“... desperate defence against the importunity of memory and the inescapability of guilt. The hero of Paul Sayer’s second book, Howling at the moon, ends up in the same kind of place as the narrator of his first, the Whitbread Prize-winning The Comforts of Madness. Michael Crumly’s decline from marital content to mental breakdown is charted with much ...”

“... to Marxist history. In France, Louis Althusser and his disciples, and in England followers such as Paul Q. Hirst and Barry Hindess, have argued that the business of Marxist intellectuals is to construct not history but theory (e.g. a rationally water tight account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, not one purportedly told from the ‘facts’ and ...”

“... to the point of desiccation. The entry explaining how σῡκοφάντης, literally ‘fig-sayer’, came to mean what we understand by the word ‘sycophant’, discussed one possibility before admitting ‘this explanation is probably a mere figment.’ It was understood that Liddell and Scott existed not for purposes of entertainment but to stand as ...”

“... could.’ This was the sketchy outline I carried with me to New York on a trip, with the producer Paul Quinn, to research a radio programme about the Beat heritage. I’d never been there before, never met Corso. I’d seen him, in the tweed sports jacket of a young academic, performing, sober, at the famous Albert Hall ‘Wholly Communion’ readings on 11 ...”

“... out of them. Of course he failed the Karl Kraus test – who didn’t? Kraus quotes some yea-sayer to the effect that Zweig with his novellas had conquered all the languages of the world, and adds two words of his own: ‘except one’. The story went the rounds that Zweig had his manuscripts checked for grammatical errors by a German professor, which ...”