“... you loathe tend to go in for. And certainly the writers in the group encouraged a belief that they read no language but English and hated music (except jazz) and pictures and theatres. This was largely nonsense, but it had its importance, especially for Larkin and Amis. To get the balance right, one needs to ask naively whether Amis would be the fine novelist ...”

“... and caution. To no avail, however – and perhaps understandably. On Saturday, 11 January 1986, Donald Trelford, the editor of the Observer, had spent a lot of time closeted in the paper’s fourth-floor boardroom. Outside the Observer’s premises that afternoon stood a convoy of Rolls-Royces and other opulent vehicles. I am not suggesting the Sultan ...”

“... also (and strangely, considering his origins in the neo-Augustan ‘Movement’ of the Fifties) Donald Davie, who kept the subject respectable, the interest alive. Michael Alexander suggests that ‘indifference and bafflement are today more common than hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work done on Pound recently: Richard ...”

“... philosophy, has edited the proceedings of the 1984 Rutgers conference on the philosophy of Donald Davidson. The scale of that conference is reflected in the size of this volume, which contains 28 substantial papers. And this is but half the story: a companion volume of similar size, drawn from the same conference, and dealing with Davidson’s essays ...”

“... but in both cases graphic design allows scanning (as against reading), and allows those buyers who read very little of the continuous text to feel that they have had their money’s worth from the paper. The ingredients of the graphic style which Brody gave The Face included ‘abstract’ Bauhaus-like alphabets, headlines letter-spaced so that long and short ...”

“... It is hard to read this book dispassionately. Its gathering of stories, portraits, travelogues and fragments embodies such a rush and depth of enthusiasm – the stuff of many lives lived in a single too-short one – that the reader grows haunted by regret for everything Bruce Chatwin would have written had he not died so early ...”

“... English translation) are the great Latinist George Buchanan and the Gaelic poet Alexander Mac-Donald. Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s expansive 18th-century Gaelic poem on deer (echoes of which can be heard in Crichton Smith and Les Murray) is juxtaposed with John Davidson’s ‘A Runnable Stag’. This should have been the book which set the agenda for all ...”

“... and more like speech; if Tristan Corbière is out of range, at least make it sound as if he had read, so to speak, Tony Harrison. (Why do so many translations of poems sound as though their authors had read no poems, ever, in any language?) In English I see sculptures made from pipe-cleaners, bullied into ...”

“... and Keats are pre-eminent. It is not a question of merit, nor of density, but of pace. If you read attempts by 19th-century English poets (Byron is something of an exception) to write poetic drama, and compare their lines with Shakespeare’s, the difference is all the more surprising because it’s so clear that Shakespeare was their model. Their lines ...”

“... as to be almost unusable as well. In her respectful but uncompromisingly sensible review of Donald Davie’s Clark Lectures on the literature of the English Dissenting tradition, for example, she complains that his survey amounts to a ‘brilliant piece of canon-making for a day which epitomises criticism in our time’. The contributors to the first ...”

“... On​ 6 October, Donald Trump made a phone call to Recep Erdoğan signalling the withdrawal of around two hundred US troops who were protecting Kurdish soldiers in northern Syria. Trump announced that he would soon make room for Turkey to clear the area and create the buffer zone Erdoğan had long wanted to impose against a hostile political entity ...”

“... that is asked of the viewer, whether novice or expert, is a) to give the show enough time; b) to read both the works and the labels; c) to inspect the cases carefully – conceptual art wasn’t made just to hang on the wall; and d) to remember that though conceptualists revelled in lists, schemes, systems and graphs, a work’s format was never an end in ...”

“... on manners tried to refine the practices of bed-sharing, spitting and blowing the nose (one may read about the ‘sociogenesis’ and ‘psychogenesis’ of these teachings in Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process, and doubtless elsewhere). Two centuries ago, when John Debrett became a miscellaneous publisher, his contemporary advice-givers had moved on ...”

“... has to set letters in the soil at appropriate distances from each other for a circling camera to read them. There isn’t room for a full alphabet, so he has to work out a code. It takes them some time to crack the code on Earth but they do. And more dramatically, the real hero of the movie turns out to be a researcher at Nasa (...”

“... 266, you ‘deaf cunt’, and so on. Less succinct salutations will be discovered by the likes of Donald Davie (‘droning out his tosh’), Ted Hughes (‘boring old monolith, no good at all – not a single solitary bit of good’) and Anthony Powell, aka ‘the horse-face dwarf’. There is even a ‘Hi, Ian’: he calls me ‘the Kerensky of ...”