“... to me that both Mr Reynolds and Mr Griffin have pushed this argument a bit far. When you’ve read these books you will be exempted from ever attending to another word about Hemingway’s home town Oak Park, a posh suburb of Chicago; and although it may seem a little ungracious to say so, for she was an interesting woman, you may feel some regret that a ...”

“... harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion and reality, but the ideological strains of legitimising overseas ...”

“... the night-watch could provide. A modern home secretary or minister for justice could do worse than read this book to get hints on how to fund the police and the criminal justice system in an age of austerity. The DPP could go for a start: for most of the 90 years in which the runners operated, the victims of crime had to support the costs of prosecution ...”

“... him, isn’t he?’ my granny would say. ‘Always had a dark side. Probably got it from his uncle Peter. He was like that as well. Morbid.’ ‘You’re just trying to draw attention to yourself,’ my father would say. ‘If something ever happens to you, I suppose you’ll want one of them statues to yourself up in the Glasgow Necropolis.’ ‘Yes,’ I ...”

“... language is one that we share with many other people – it is not a private language at all. Now Peter Hacker would express the thought differently, but in my opinion Rose and Hacker are not much at odds with each other. I do not think that Rose is philosophically tone deaf at all – but I did say that my prejudices are too close to his judgments for me to ...”

“... of Lamarck. The point that Desmond brings out so well – drawing on the work of Martin Rudwick, Peter Bowler and Michael Bartholomew – is that Darwin’s Origin of Species actually caught Huxley on the wrong foot. If the future of scientific naturalism was, after all, to be bound up with an evolutionary theory, there was a respect in which Huxley had ...”

“... reader a sense of flatness and emptiness. It seemed all ready to be made into the play Yonadab, by Peter Shaffer, which accentuated the vacuum of style and gave it a purely theatrical emphasis. The real trouble, perhaps, was that Jacobson had seen all too clearly what a good story the rape of King David’s only daughter, by his eldest son, makes in the ...”

“... and hermetic speculations of a young writer who seems to have heeded Jack Spicer’s advice and read the weirdest stuff on which he could lay hands. There were no job offers from Chatto or Faber for this particular poet, but in the Sixties at least there were casual openings in the East London labour market: cutting municipal grass, packing cigars in ...”

“... we that love her so much? These questions rise and fall like the sound of distant applause as you read the Christie’s catalogue. And occasional answers can seem to spring from the pictures and descriptions of the objects themselves. The book is a slick and a morbid affair: the clothes are really nothing without Marilyn in them; many of the photographs show ...”

“... but evidently set to work to find internal evidence to support it. Yesterday he came again and read us a passage from Graham Balfour’s life of RLS … I think you have the life so I didn’t copy the passage. Louis must have varied in what he intended to represent in ‘Will of the Mill’ – or ‘someone has blundered.’ Looking at the first edition ...”

“... always the right’ ones), giving its character to his paradoxical modernism. When he read The Waste Land in the mid-1920s, the line ‘C.i.f. London: documents at sight’ was as a stone dropped down a well, echoing with riverside workshops, bills of lading, sight-drafts, brokerage, bonded goods and harbour dues. The odd relatives and elders who ...”

“... brotherhood was a Chaucerian addition to Boccaccio’s original Theseid and it is hard not to read into it a reference to the kissing knights of Constantinople. Clanvowe and Neville were close enough to Chaucer to witness a document releasing the poet from liabilities in a mysterious rape charge of 1380. And in his high-minded Boke of Cupide God of ...”

“... romances, ‘the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness’. Humberstall, who has to read the stuff, says resentfully: ‘Twasn’t as if there was anythin’ to ’em, either. I know. I had to read ‘em.’ But in the course of time, because the books are involved with the memory of the only class-free ...”

“... the accession of Mrs Thatcher to Downing Street. I was about the same age as Chris when I first read about her ‘harvest madness’, and about how ‘glad’ she was that ‘her legs were long from the knee to the ankle,’ because ‘that made legs seem stumbling and stumpy, shortness there’. The madness, too, of her father, John Guthrie, whose eyes ...”

“... of a poor settler family – his own family – in Algeria. If Sartre and his circle had lived to read it, they might have forgiven Camus for brandishing his proletarian credentials in Paris. In La Peste, Rieux the doctor is a model of fortitude (a good novel with an irreproachable citizen at its centre; how hard is that to write?). But there is also an ...”