“... of Michel Houellebecq’s first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), translated into English under the dismal title Whatever (1998), the nameless protagonist falls into a severe depression. He leaves a note on his desk saying ‘I AM SICK,’ and checks himself into a ‘rest home’. Relations with his psychologist are not easy: She took me to ...”

“... politics of ‘lawful constitutions’ and ‘natural right’ – from the murderous madness of Richard III, you might say, to the enlightened benevolence of Nathan the Wise. Whatever might come of it in France, the French Revolution had ‘revealed in human nature … a capacity for improvement that no politician could have conjured up’ and, according to ...”

“... from some alien realm. I remembered something else she had said too: ‘I’ve always hated the English view of the novel … that there should be irony … distance … a very fine cool style, a very conservative way of writing a novel.’ I was glad when I found Diamanda Galas’s tribute on the Internet – ‘I once had a conversation with her late one ...”

“... I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. Elizabeth Taylor was more famous than ...”

“... and cultural process,’ perhaps forgetting that ‘birth’ does not merely mean parturition in English. Turning from the attitudes of the nobility in Paris to the misfortunes of Psyche in Apuleius’ fable, Scott adopts modern ideas as well as modern vocabulary. She claims that Psyche ‘did not overturn the dominion of male subjectivity ... but sought ...”

“... Glanvill, has an engraving of occult scenes, including the levitation of a Somerset boy called Richard Jones in 1657. This was the same phenomenon experienced by St Teresa but the English church no longer permitted Jones to be a saint and he was said to be bewitched. It’s significant that Glanvill’s work, one of the ...”

“... and national cause in Hungary, Poland and Italy. The press presented the war as a defence of ‘English’ ideals – liberalism, constitutionalism and international law – against the Russian bear.There wasn’t much British postwar identification with the Crimea either. It never caught the imagination as a ‘lieu de mémoire’. In her excellent new ...”

“... in ‘decent mixed society’; in male society it was ‘contemptuously described by a good old English cognomen’ which he refused to utter in the House. The government had just announced that it would set up a committee to look into homosexual offences, and the trouble was that you couldn’t legislate for homosexuality, or preferably against it, without ...”

“... the motorist had been to blame, but in any case Grandpa was a hopeless witness because he spoke English badly with a strong foreign accent: I was told the judge had bullied him as if that was his fault, which doesn’t sound implausible. I was to hear about that again and again, especially whenever the subject of the law came up. The one thing I didn’t ...”

“... Until 15 or 20 years ago most students of English literature would have known one thing about Anna Letitia Barbauld, which was her appearance in a droll anecdote told by Samuel Taylor Coleridge towards the end of his life and recorded in the posthumous volume of his Table Talk. ‘Mrs Barbauld told me that the only faults she found with the Ancient Mariner were – that it was improbable, and had no moral,’ Coleridge is reported as saying: ‘As for the probability – to be sure that might admit some question – but I told her that in my judgment the chief fault of the poem was that it had too much moral, and that too openly obtruded upon the reader ...”

“... took an interest in literary criticism, history and philosophy as well as society gossip. Richard Steele, the magazine’s editor and a friend of Swift’s, puffed the poet and his work in an introduction. This new writer, he said, deserved to be read and admired because he had ‘run into a Way perfectly new, and describ’d Things exactly as they ...”

“... in life, to writing for a living.Chandler’s reacquaintance with the American language after an English private school education defined his style. Jameson compares him to Nabokov, as a writer in a borrowed tongue: ‘Language can never again be unself-conscious for him.’ His trademark comparisons, so often imitated and parodied, have kept their ...”

“... the maquisards.’In Laurent Mauvignier’s novel about the war, Des hommes (2009), published in English as The Wound and recently made into a film by the Belgian director Lucas Belvaux, a young appelé ‘thinks of what he’s been told about Oradour-sur-Glane’ while wandering through an empty village razed by the army. This was a typical scene, repeated ...”

“... the ‘has to ... have to’? What necessity may be implied by the auxiliary power of that modest English verb? Other sentences come at us with a hyperbolic twist, yet strike home like a curveball right over the plate. ‘Not only does the critic say something that the work does not say, but he even says something that he himself does not mean to say. The ...”

“... Monroe. Like so many young London literati of the period – Wyndham Lewis and T.E. Hulme and Richard Aldington and F.S. Flint – Eliot fell under the spell of Pound’s beguiling mixture of flamboyance, generosity and startling self-confidence. Together they orchestrated what in hindsight can seem like a hostile takeover of the somewhat moribund London ...”