“... was said to have breathed ‘the atmosphere of the Council of Nicaea’ rather than Harrow-on-the-Hill, but his ineptness cannot explain why Westminster’s pupil numbers were also plummeting (from 300 in 1821 to 67 twenty years later), as were Shrewsbury’s, Winchester’s and Rugby’s. This widespread crisis of recruitment must have had more to do with ...”

“... slums in England, or that the slums would be where they had to live. Johnson was enrolled in Tulse Hill School, a large comprehensive for boys. Despite having excellent grades, he was put in the lowest educational stream, a fate common to immigrant children. He describes it as one of his earliest experiences of institutional racism.Johnson’s adolescence ...”

“... was eight in the morning and Venus was hanging like a wrecker’s light above the Black Craig. The hill itself – seen from our kitchen window – was still in silhouette, though the sky was lightening to a pale yellow-grey. It was a weakling light, stealing into the world like a thief through a window someone forgot to close. The talk was all of Christmas ...”

“... are the hallmark of Lewis’s writing at its best. They also got him into a lot of trouble. Paul O’Keeffe’s new Life of Lewis does not hold back on the toe-jam. Some Sort of Genius is, among other things, a compendium of the many reasons people found to dislike its subject. Lewis became, sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by design, the sponsor of ...”

“... them like squeezed-out grapefruit skins. In the course of 24 hours, I might be Nick Adams, Paul Morel, and sitting in one of the dives on 52nd Street, uncertain and afraid, as the clever hopes expired of a low dishonest decade; but these were less acts of serious reading than experiments in identity, made by somebody who very much feared that he lacked ...”

“... points out the totality of fantasy represented by Jimimie Fane, the biographee. As his friend Paul Fussell admiringly told Wolcott, Amis-lovers in America revered him chiefly for his absolute lack of ‘sincerity’, that great American quality: ‘everything about Amis is figurative.’ Wriggling out of sincerity like a tight shirt has always been the ...”

“... about the case of Léopold Sfax, who might be called a philosophical cousin not very removed of Paul de Man. Sfax, like de Man, arrived in America as a young man in flight from German-occupied France. He has a great reputation at New Harbor, ‘perhaps America’s most prestigious Ivy League institution’. His deconstructionist work Either/Either, the ...”

“... older than his 38 years – he refers to his ‘time of life’ as if he were nearly over the hill. His account of Molly Bloom gives her several more lovers than the book by my reading, indicates, unless he means her admirers. Sometimes his commentary sounds like the report of a Marriage Guidance Counsellor – ‘He and Molly must face their problems of ...”

“... a Victorian archdeacon’s wife, who boldly inscribed her name in her own copy of Fanny Hill.) Only one complaint is voiced by Polly, very tentatively, in a letter to her beloved Aunt Frances, when she mentions that, had she been a boy, ‘the money would have been found’ to send her to school. We remember Defoe: ‘I have often thought of it as ...”

“... above the tannin scum: leathery seaweed, wads of yellow paper. They tiptoe out, speeded-up Benny Hill, over sharp stones, to neat piles of folded clothes. The watched, towelled down and returned to their balconies, rusting rails and anti-gull devices, become the watchers. A slow-motion cinema of such tender boredom that they will never move again. Along the ...”

“... this style was the magnate, George Walker; once, according to James Morton, an ‘ally’ of Billy Hill and Eddie Chapman, later a frequently puffed adornment of the Thatcherite open market culture.) There is nothing new in the concept, quality tailoring bonded over primal naughtiness. It has been spelled out frequently in the underground literature that ...”

“... to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.5 March. On my walk I pass the Primrose Hill Community Library, which is closed to borrowers today but open for children, who throng the junior library, some of them sitting with an adult presumably learning to read, others in groups being told stories and at every table children reading on their ...”

“... which heedlessly slips out of earshot (‘Past the near meadows, over the still stream,/Up the hill-side’) and so brings Keats’s poem to an unpremeditated close. Carver’s poem sets about capturing the quotidian and resists the charms of art, but ends up as art anyhow. Keats is no less self-conscious, but his poem works in almost the opposite way: he ...”

“... in 1945. He returns the favour by rescuing the captain from rioting police at the 1977 Notting Hill Carnival. (Moorcock retains from his Sixties days a hatred of pigs and politicians.) At the end of the novel, Josef and Mary marry – another allusion hovers. David, palsied from the doses of tranquillisers prescribed him, drowns: not in one of his ...”

“... as Saul Steinberg has it in the old cartoon, pushing a huge, boulder-like question-mark – up a hill. The poems that elicited most controversy were the cycles ‘Landscapes’ and ‘List’. Here’s ‘On the Table’, a poem from the former: The tablecloth stretches Into infinity The ghostly Shadow of a toothpick follows The bloody trail of the ...”