“... the woman in the tight pinstriped suit waiting at the bottom of the ramp in the third book, who may or may not be the same ‘luscious lady’ with ‘shapely legs’ and a ‘short, snugly fitting blue pinstriped suit’ who mysteriously pays his bus fare in the first one. There’s also the bus conductress he will have ...”

“... Davis remembers him telling her that he used to get nervous before delivering them. Part of it may have been to do with the methodical patience he learned during his two years in the mountain fastness of the Sierra Maestra. It was also the place where Castro, who worshipped Martí’s verses and read Gabriel García Márquez’s first drafts, wrote his own ...”

“... recent exercise – it’s now called the Research Excellence Framework – were released last May. The assessments are the Thatcher government’s most significant contribution to research policy, and are obsessed over by university leaders, emulated in some countries and studied in many more. They have both reflected and facilitated the UK’s ...”

“... it’s ‘a product without a single fault, available at the lowest price possible’. Some may scoff, but it turned out to be a shrewd investment, since it is now sold out, and used copies are changing hands on eBay for larger sums. There is also an accompanying set of postcards, ‘Highlights in the History of The Invisible Book’, which includes ...”

“... criticism, and he aligns himself with similarly inclined critics (Hugh Kenner, John Hollander, Richard Poirier, Lionel Trilling, and above all Empson) who use theory, when they use it at all, for the most part to clear the ground for attentive reading. The phrase which serves as the title of the collection is taken from Paul Valéry’s remark about ...”

“... scald craving beggary above the degrees of them both, as is largely seen in the brawling works of Richard Maydeston.’ He thus contributes to the oratory of Protestant dissent which Ted Hughes and Tom Paulin have both evoked as a lost – or at least neglected – strand of the national tradition. Bale blazoned his desiderata as much as he reviled the ...”

“... an infuriating wallflower, eavesdropping on the glorious beauty of Shelley’s marriage to Mary. Richard Holmes’s unsurpassable biography, Shelley: The Pursuit, written in the ‘golden years’ of the early Seventies, was the first to rescue Claire from the patronage of the Shelley-worshippers and to introduce her as a political thinker, who not only ...”

“... of the telephone has not yet fostered the habit of returning calls.’ Eight: Finnegans Wake may have something to do with the execution, on 8 December 1922 – of Rory O’Connor, one of the Irregulars. Nine: ‘Dublin remains obsessed with the writers it doesn’t read.’ I have listed these items mainly to indicate that anything you care to say about ...”

“... work on the 18th century has shown, he writes well. His Thoughts on the Present Discontents may not quite match Burke’s: but they are cleverly marshalled. His many insights are highly informative. His few in comprehensions could hardly be more revealing. Mr Carswell names the Assessors who sat with the Robbins Committee and acted as liaison officers ...”

“... unprecedented and wonderful (the Louvre’s is the version copyists soon fastened on), and it may well be that a courtier or emissary had made him a better offer. Some scholars wonder if the Confraternity balked at the picture, considered as an exposition of its great Immaculate theme. It does seem to make more sense – though nothing, in my view, is ...”

“... status’. When we look at some of the words Ogilvie identifies as suffering in this way, we may feel a little sympathetic to Burchfield: was it so strange for him to apply this most discreet of labels to sambal, the name of a Malay condiment, or kuruma, a Japanese word for a rickshaw? Burchfield arrived in Oxford from New Zealand in 1949 and died in ...”

“... curvaceous wooden form strung like a harp which we gaze at in dumbfounded silence. These days, it may well be a drystone wall winding between trees before burying its end in a lake, like the great Norse serpent for ever drinking the world’s waters dry. Or a cairn on a Highland headland with a fire flaming inside it. Or a longboat made of stakes and stones ...”

“... the establishment of some higher ethical concept.’ Consciousness of his honourable calling may induce the poet to present himself as at once dignified and eccentric – epithets which catch some aspects of Empson as a social presence. Part of his eccentricity must be an interest, unshared by most literary people, in the greatest imaginative ...”

“... mood. The immediate inspiration of Religio Laici was the work of a French Catholic priest, Richard Simon, who had written a crafty but temperate essay to undermine the basic Protestant position by investigating the obvious corruption of the Old Testament text. Reliance on Scripture as the sole authority for belief was, as he gravely ...”

“... even the FBI satisfied itself of this after years of investigation – he was nevertheless (if I may quote my own memories of him) much more than the generic New Deal ‘progressive’ to which Stowe tries to reduce him. Hammond’s record as a discoverer and developer of talent from 1933 to his death was unparalleled. It rested not only on astonishing ...”