“... Before printing, actually, in the days of scrolls and tablets: what is the Bible if not a self-help manual? William Caxton got in on the act early enough with The Game and Play of Chess Moralised (1474), a book which aimed to make people better than they used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but by bringing their pawns closer to the ...”

“... history of Westerns: Henry Nash Smith’s classic Virgin Land is redolent of New Deal optimism, Robert Warshow’s much anthologised essay ‘The Westerner’ is a précis of Cold War concerns, Leslie Fiedler’s Return of the Vanishing American rescripts the West in countercultural terms and Richard Slotkin’s vast Gunfighter Nation is haunted by ...”

“... manipulation. The contrast between these two views is perhaps brought out most clearly in Robert Trivers’s seminal article from 1974 on the conflict between parents and offspring. A natural theologian is likely to assume that parents and their developing offspring are engaged in a largely harmonious project, directed at the efficient production of a ...”

“... Eton means nothing in this context. Both men have been for most of their lives rich, confident and self-assured. Neither belongs to the aristocracy, though Mr Macmillan married into it. And what does ‘aristocracy’ really mean in a world of endless absorption and assimilation? All this chip-on-the-shoulder fussication about social class, exploited ...”

“... novels, presents rape as a therapeutic solution to female frigidity. In 2014, the novelist (and self-identified Vonnegut fan) Kathleen Founds wrote, in a piece for Buzzfeed, that the story embraces ‘the myth that a woman who dresses provocatively shouldn’t be surprised if a man forces her to have sex. The myth that women unconsciously desire to be ...”

“... 1914, Tuchman is forced to invent one of her own. The result is a series of eight essays, self-contained, entertaining in themselves, with occasional patches of superb writing, but feebly connected by concepts taken from the period itself: ‘the unconscious boredom of peace’, the desire for combat, and the existence of surplus energies seeking ...”

“... a second wife in circumstances felt as not altogether usual:       his fair daughter’s self, as I avowedAt starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll goTogether down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ is a tricky poem: very striking in its own ...”

“... Robert Stone was born in August 1937, nine months after Don DeLillo and three – we’re told – after Thomas Pynchon. Dog Soldiers, his second novel, made his name in the mid-1970s, and since then he has stubbornly held his ground on the upper slopes of American literary life. Fellowships, prizes, grants and commissions have rarely been in short supply, and his later books – from A Flag for Sunrise to Damascus Gate – have been much admired ...”

“... crude likeness to Shelley, save that his nose is a switchback and his lines blurred ... The usual self-consciousness of young men, especially as he threw in, gratuitously, the information that he descends from Dean, Rector, Bishop, Von Ranke etc etc, only in order to say that he despises them. I tried, perhaps, to curry favour, as my weakness is. L was ...”

“... also writing his Life of Wittgenstein; these days he doesn’t need to work in a bookshop. Not so Robert Topping, for 12 years the manager of Waterstone’s in Manchester, who was sacked in June for selling too diverse a range of books. Will Self took up the cause to have him reinstated, but at the time of writing, the ...”

“... Even in the political fluidity of the Thirties and the Second World War, Bracken, with his self-created and well-advertised mystique as a man of mystery, taxed to the limit the Tories’ appetite for self-made adventurers, already fully tested in the past by such as Disraeli and ‘F.E.’ Bracken, on the face of ...”

“... For a spell during the 1960s, Robert Creeley’s ‘I Know a Man’ may have been the most often quoted, even the most widely known, short poem by a living American. Here is the poem: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, – John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going ...”

“... rather maddening. As revealed in his letters he comes across to me as vain, attitudinising and self-dramatising, self-obsessed yet – to the very end – with very little in the way of self-knowledge. I can see there must be something wrong with this reaction, and for the good reason ...”

“... Robert McLiam Wilson was born in 1964, which means that Ripley Bogle, his first novel, was written in his early twenties. The novel’s qualities are those of immodest youth: it is ambitious, energetic, self absorbed, bursting with hormonal vehemence and self-consciousness ...”

“... Robert Peters​ , né Parkins, wasn’t much to look at. He was ‘a little man with a stiff back who walked like a penguin’. Photographs show him as steeply balding, with a rice puddingy face that glooped onto his dog collar. He was tubby, and got tubbier. But something about him made a certain kind of woman sit up ...”