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“... This is a polemical book. From the time of Dryden to the mid-20th century, Dr Brewer argues, English literary culture has been dominated by what he calls ‘Neoclassicism’ – by a taste, that is, for the realistic representation of likely events. A.C. Bradley is in this sense a Neoclassical critic; and the most characteristic product of Neoclassical taste is the naturalistic novel ...”

“... added, with characteristic candour: ‘At the Socratic the enemy often wipe the floor with us.’ Derek Brewer, a pupil of Lewis’s who was later to become Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, formed the impression that Lewis attended, and presided over, the Socratic ‘entirely as a sacrificial duty, and loathed it’. This may well be an ...”

“... at retirement, not necessarily early. Any series-editor would be proud of a team which includes Derek Brewer, Derek Traversi, D.W. Harding, L.G. Salingar, Peter Ure, Ian Watt, J.C. Maxwell, L.C. Knights, D.J. Enright, Roy Strong, John Broadbent, Arthur Humphreys, Philip Collins, Pat Rogers, D.W. Jefferson and John ...”

“... Ask what has been the single greatest influence on literary research since the Sixties and the answer might be the Xerox machine, the jumbo jet or Jacques Derrida. Ask what will transform literary research in the next ten years and a likely answer is The English Poetry Full-Text Database. This project, whose three serial instalments will be complete this summer, has reportedly clocked up almost a hundred sales ...”

“... above all, our involvement in the bloody turmoil of the Caribbean, where the very ocean, in Derek Walcott’s words, drags the ‘weight of chains of centuries’. The British colonial regime in the West Indies began with the occupation of Barbados in 1605, six years before The Tempest was written. Marina Warner’s magnificent new novel portrays an ...”

“... carve-up of 1984, when Reuters went public. Sandy Gall was nearly shot as a spy in the Congo. Derek Jameson was briefly a member of a leftwing, partly Communist cell that interfered with the transmission of copy. During the Vietnam war, a Reuters stringer worked secretly for the CIA, while really being a double agent for the Vietcong; challenged, he said ...”

“... checked the archive footage of the meetings chaired by the British Leyland trade union convenor Derek ‘Red Robbo’ Robinson, but would I really catch a glimpse there of a peeping child in the colours of Rees-Mogg’s old prep school? At the time Robinson quit the national stage, Rees-Mogg was ten years old. Rees-Mogg’s adoration of Thatcher ...”