“... if he had spelt it all out in the true first person, recounting his triumphs and disasters in the field of sex and family life. The moral seems to be that writers use themselves better in their novels and stories than in an autobiography, in which they simply put it all down, with various degrees of relaxation and garrulity. A memoir by Proust, instead of a ...”

“... from economics to geology – were closely intertwined with theology. Take anthropology, a field not as remote from English as it might appear. The 16th and 17th centuries, as Tricia Ross has shown in an article for the Journal of the History of Ideas, saw the emergence of ‘anthropologia’, a blend of anatomy and theology concerned as much with the ...”

“... at the beginning of the piece, describing in disapproving tones the lavish festivities at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, when Henry made his state visit to Francis I of France: … men might say Till this time pomp was single, but now married To one above itself. Each following day Became the next day’s master, till the last Made former wonders ...”

“... feature film (give or take $17m) on treacherous locations in the 1980s, it is unrivalled: frank, amusing and amused, vivid and, above all, even-tempered. A passionate man whose project was beset by vicissitudes, Boorman nevertheless admits to only one spectacular and cathartic loss of temper. Everyone in the film business, Boorman recognises, has his ...”

“... hospital for surgery were ‘exposed to more chances of death than was the English soldier on the field of Waterloo’. By the end of the 19th century, however, Joseph Lister had introduced an effective antisepsis routine, and this, combined with anaesthesia, had transformed surgery (though mortality rates were still high). Surgeons were becoming heroes: in ...”

“... regard for titled rank, his thinking more of his heredity than of his art. The little book is frank all right, but it portrays a human being of undoubted appeal, Scots to the hilt, and ubiquitously understood as such, but far more than a national effigy. The present over-annotated edition of Macrone’s Life looks at moments like a book that only a ...”

“... touchstones (Wittgenstein and the Tractatus), and artists who were fashionable at the time (Frank Stella, Donald Judd). Or so the published transcription tells us. As typed by Baldwin on a shiny surface called Mirralon (a mysterious medium that looks like silvery plastic foil, but is apparently unknown to Google), communicative coherence breaks ...”

“... The person chiefly responsible for the new note of jollity was Charles Hamilton, better known as Frank Richards, who made a Never Never Land of the English public school, but did it with such dash, amiability and authority that every subsequent generation, right up to the present, has contained its quota of Greyfriars enthusiasts. Greyfriars came into being ...”

“... know what I’m talking about – which, if nothing else, should make a sensational change in the field of radio criticism, though I hasten to add that so far as television is concerned, I chiefly speak as a viewer and a performer; my personal experience of televisual management and production is minimal. Nevertheless, it does enable me to say that the ...”

“... values, typified by Mr Pooter, and schoolboys lapped up the snobbish school stories of Frank Richards. They also demanded new sporting heroes: many cricketers became celebrities, particularly if they cultivated swagger. W.G. Grace maintained his stardom because few knew he had a squeaky voice, but several other on-...”

“... only for the moment in which one is reading the play or seeing a production. Shakespeare is, as Frank Kermode termed him in a lecture given to celebrate the poet’s 400th birthday in 1964, ‘patient’: he endures because his writing has ‘power to absorb our questions’ and has shown an extraordinary ability to adapt itself to the concerns of each ...”

“... has to be addressed, however much we may feel – in Muriel Spark’s case, anyway – that the field has already been ploughed pretty thoroughly. Perhaps another way of approaching Spark’s fiction would be to consider the distinction between those novels which are written around a single, organising consciousness (Loitering with Intent, A Far Cry from ...”

“... clause in the speech and writing of the young. Songs punctuate the news to unpremeditated effect: Frank Sinatra, Petula Clark, Victoria de los Angeles, and, one morning, Yves Montand singing the favourite song of the Italian Communist partisans. It is difficult to exclude the external world if you cannot recognise it. I was in a position to think these ...”

“... such weather with that experienced by our predecessors.’ He had used weather information in Frank Wild’s diary from Shackleton’s expedition to plan the polar trip, extrapolating from a single year to work out how much food and fuel would be necessary for his own journey. He made no allowance for exceptional bad weather because he wasn’t expecting ...”

“... in another writer – one fouled cosmos gently twinned with another – is here turned into a frank split-screen narrative: the two stories almost run alongside each other and the narrative is briefly turned over to the fish, from whose sunken perspective we sense family events. ‘A few times the downstairs door slammed hard enough to jolt him awake. Or ...”