“... offers detailed information about life at Winchester, where Empson’s companions included Richard Crossman, William Hayter, John Sparrow and other future grandees. It was, as he later remarked, ‘a ripping education’, a first-class ticket for life. The next stop was Cambridge, by means of a scholarship to Magdalene. At this optimum moment of ...”

“... that fits him to his biography. Wilde was to become a ‘common prisoner’, wear convict dress, read Dante in Reading Gaol and write a great and scarifying ballad about a murderer’s execution. However, what fascinated him in 1882 was the image of that tidy, white, utilitarian building with books of poems inside it. What relation could Dante and Shelley ...”

“... studied. In our day, the political bias has resurfaced in the racist hypotheses and conclusions of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. One of the twins in Neubauer’s study later remarked, ‘This is nightmarish, Nazi shit,’ while the psychiatrist involved in the study confessed: ‘In those days we were playing God.’ Satan, I’d ...”

“... loyal to jazz since the Thirties, and The Duke Ellington Reader is worth its price simply for Richard Boyer’s magnificent profile of the great man (‘The Hot Bach’), which first appeared there in 1944. It is safe to say that, at that time, in no American city outside New York would nightclubs like Café Society, militantly devoted to the social ...”

“... nothing really mattered except writing well. Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa are read here as metafictions of a sort, metaphors of Hemingway’s aesthetic. And there is no reason to doubt Reynolds’s claims about Hemingway’s influence. His stories of the Thirties – featuring a lesbian wife, a homosexual bullfighter, a castrated boy ...”

“... opened it with a rusty key fastened to a turtledove, he found a piece of parchment that read: ‘This day, 6 June 1786, this iron box, containing six handkerchiefs, was placed among the roots of an orange tree by me, Balsamo, Count of Cagliostro, to serve in the performance of an act of magic, which will be executed on the same day sixty years hence ...”

“... biggest of the changes he introduced to aid prisoner rehabilitation: inmates were encouraged to read and write. For Herman Spector, the prison’s librarian, the programme became a pet project: in 1957, when 18 per cent of the American public used a library, Spector produced a report to show that 90 per cent of San Quentin’s prisoners were borrowing ...”

“... this outcome was less gratifying. It infuriated anti-revisionist stalwarts like Martin Malia and Richard Pipes, who consider that in 1991 their side won the Sovietological argument along with the Cold War, and that this victory should be duly acknowledged. Malia’s complaint that he has been marginalised in an academic field whose members refuse to address ...”

“... how artificial a construct it is, it has warning bells built in. The central characters are called Richard and Karen; Karen is very, very thin; she takes one diet pill too many and is visited by aliens. And so on. Names, chapter-titles, bits of dialogue and even the central plot concept in this most crashingly earnest of novels are also the most frivolous of ...”

“... history. Most striking was the impetus given to the careers of black authors: Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were given their first chance by the FWP. Its ambition was to create – or rather to discover – a great American epic in the acts and words of ordinary men and women: to draw from the disregarded speech and customs of the ...”

“... what he meant, and that he had a Meaning, in this or that Place. And thus every-one was taught to read with his Eyes. The image of Georgian England that still prevails today, some commentators argue, is Georgian England as Pope saw it. The beliefs that inform Pope’s works, and The Dunciad in particular – that the advent of a literary marketplace was ...”

“... into more than half its carrier’s offspring, will spread. These genes are not merely selfish in Richard Dawkins’s sense of being selected to out-compete different versions of themselves in the population: they are ruthless because, as in the case of Medea, they can spread even though their effects are strongly detrimental to the evolutionary interests of ...”

“... man. A book, In the Wake of a Deadad, would emerge. Even silence – Paul Auster, Dinos Chapman, Richard Wentworth – would be published. ‘No reply’ becomes part of the texture, along with hesitations, prevarications, confessions. Many of the respondents turn Kötting’s challenge back on themselves: their refusal to look into the eyes of a lifeless ...”

“... it begins where the troubadour canon leaves off. Along with a handful of lyrics by Chaucer, Richard Rolle, and some less familiar names, it includes fifty anonymous poems of immense variety. Genres are defined loosely, if at all, and even such basic categories as ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ prove to be thoroughly intertwined. In place of the ...”

“... such was the passion for it that, from Edward II on, English kings tried to ban it. Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV all passed edicts against it (it was getting in the way of archery and other martial pursuits). In 1457, James II of Scotland decreed that ‘fute-ball and golfe be utterly cryed down’, while Henry VIII made football a penal ...”