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“... Also like his namesake, Dave is a verbal genius. Reading Self is often reminiscent not of William Burroughs, as Self himself might wish, or of J.G. Ballard, whom Self obviously admires and seeks to emulate (clear echoes in The Book of Dave of The Drowned World), but rather of Norman Mailer, particularly the vainglorious, dick-swinging Mailer of ‘The ...”

“... to undergraduates, taking his first job at Amherst College in 1917. Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane all lived by other means; though it’s worth pointing out that the poetry and criticism of Eliot in particular, and to a lesser extent of Pound, played a significant role in shaping the curriculum and ...”

“... lecturer in philosophy and Roman history. Much of his time was spent working on his own peculiar brand of idealist philosophy – increasingly old-fashioned as it must have seemed by the mid-1930s to those who were starting to listen to A.J. Ayer and J.L. Austin. The summers he devoted to digging, and to transcribing, recording and drawing Roman inscriptions ...”

“... Melmotte. Even Disraeli reckoned that capitalism of the sort that came to Britain with William of Orange (‘Dutch finance’) was detestable: it had resulted in ‘the degradation of a fettered and burthened multitude … made debt a national habit … credit the ruling power … introduced a loose, inexact, haphazard and dishonest spirit in the ...”

“... were ‘gnawing away at images as if they wished to devour their feet’. Two centuries later, William Hogarth’s disturbing etching Enthusiasm Delineated, produced between 1760 and 1762, shows parishioners with simian features devouring statuettes of Christ. Hogarth, a deist, was attacking both icon worship and the sacrament of the Eucharist, tarring ...”

“... who started publishing fiction in the 1950s – Butor and Murdoch but also Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Muriel Spark and Pynchon – and who were not just trying to make sense of our lives but, as Kermode put it, ‘making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives’.For Murray, ‘a real Pynchon thing’ is the mode of thinking where you ...”

“... and motives of his fellow-lodger’. These words were penned by Robert Latham’s collaborator, William Matthews, who died in 1976. He was a scholar in the old style, not given to trendy assimilation of historic sources into the narratology of modern angst. But his effort to see the diary as something more than ‘full, objective reporting’, a bigger ...”

“... 1790s, headed by two men of humble English origins and recent American experience, Tom Paine and William Cobbett. Their innovation was to develop a tone and style which sounded more like the spoken language of the mass of the people than like the Latinate written discourse of the educated orders. Most of Smith’s chapters are studies in the use of this ...”

“... weak a term for this stranglehold on the mike. It is more like a willed act of occult possession: William Blake becoming Milton so that he can recompose the older poet’s faults. Home, over-age, is an envenomed revenger, fast as flame, burning up the feeble avatars of Allen’s formulaic prose – letting the ghosts through, the instigators of riot.Single ...”

“... the grand, unplayable parts, after this, are open to him: Skelton’s Magnificence, Ibsen’s Brand, Goethe’s Faust – anything, so long as we can see those lion eyes search for solace, that great jaw sag.’ Olivier was his star of stars, drawing from forgotten depths the pure fan-worship of the child who spent long Birmingham mornings in bed with ...”

“... out how the popes piped fresh water to their city and sewage away from it.* Lawrence Principe and William Newman (Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 2002) and Pamela Smith (The Making and Knowing Project) have decrypted arcane manuscripts and recreated forgotten crafts to establish how alchemists and artisans actually did their work, which they then ...”

“... literary opinions are just as forcefully expressed. There is a long list of enthusiasms: for William Howells and Ulysses S. Grant, for Logan Pearsall Smith, Frederick Prokosch, Edith Wharton, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Love Peacock and Henry Miller: ‘If he often sounded like the village idiot, that was because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the ...”

“... states of mind might dwell within the same body. The result of this approach is a rich and unusual brand of intellectual history: more interested in the typical and representative second-rate figure than the transcendent philosopher out of sympathy with his time; strong on individual minds but sceptical of free-floating ideas. But there are difficulties with ...”

“... at the wizened proprietor of the filling-station, who wore a long-peaked cap with the name of a brand of oil stitched on it, and who agreed, though without much vehemence, to everything his customer said. It was extraordinary how threatened the Texan appeared to feel by that procession on the road below: but one just had to look at the flushed face under ...”

“... celebrated Murakami’s ‘bold willingness to go straight over-the-top’, but Wonderland’s brand of Science Fiction owes more to the winning cartoonism of Kurt Vonnegut (touched perhaps by Raymond Roussel’s delight in deliriously over-elaborate explanations) than to the dirty cyberpunk realism of Sterling and ...”