“... I’m not sure he ever had doubts: he had questions – and the argument for theory was all the more enjoyable (his word) because it had to be made, as he described it, in a country such as Britain, ‘so gruffly unreceptive to anything even faintly theoretical’; or foreign. John’s working life divides easily: a little ...”

“... slipped into their own tone. Some of Larkin’s most haunting lines have ghostly originals here. More remarkable are the ear and the eye with which Amis has picked out and recalled the rare masterpieces among poets like Newbolt, Masefield, Squire, who wrote mostly workmanlike junk. Did it seem junk when they wrote it, to themselves and their readers? Hard to ...”

“... when severed, it is proposed to pass off as Claudio’s, as ‘a man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep – careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come: insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal’. David Smith finds most of this description eminently applicable to H.G. Wells (whom he intensely ...”

“... one of his last columns, published in March 1966, O’Brien looked back on his catechism, compiled more than twenty years earlier, and described it as ‘an exegetic survey of the English language in its extremity of logo-daedalate poliomyelitis, anaemic prostration and the paralysis of incoherence’. One month after writing that, he was dead, and yet within ...”

“... change.’Views, in fact, become the substance of the narrative, which is governed by a series of more or less conscious choices or avoidance manoeuvres on the part of its protagonists. Catton has said that her work on Jane Austen’s Emma (she wrote the screenplay for the 2020 film adaptation) influenced Birnam Wood’s structure: it emulates the Austen mode ...”

“... The multi-volume Collected Letters is more of a literary monument than a necessary scholarly resource. The club of 20th-century novelists thus honoured is as exclusive as the strictest Leavisite (if any remain) or St James blackballer could wish: D.H. Lawrence (seven vols), Virginia Woolf (six vols), Thomas Hardy (seven vols) and Katherine Mansfield (four vols ...”

“... Sylvester, often hard to understand. So much drink in the book that I wonder, had I liked drink more, would it have altered my life and made it more eventful. Not only do I hardly drink and Rupert neither, but I don’t know anyone who does, Peter Cook about the only drunk I’ve ever known. In New York in the 1980s I ...”

“... goods up the River Parrett under the name of the Somerset Trading Company. Robert’s younger son, Thomas, married the niece of Samuel Stuckey, the founder of Stuckey’s Bank, a sizeable local house which had already swallowed up several tiddlers. Thomas rose to become vice-chairman, and so in due course did his son ...”

“... the greatest miseries to which human nature is liable.’ Though their tones could hardly differ more, Pilkington and Orrery had the same idea: what made Swift a satirist was what made him, eventually, go out of his mind. It is as if being him were intolerable. Biographers have been drawn to Swift by this sense that there must have been something singular ...”

“... thousand people attending his funeral in Belfast. One week later, Francis Hughes died, and eight more men – Patsy O’Hara, Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine – starved themselves to death in the months that followed. During that summer of ...”

“... world centred on what he called ‘poetic knowledge’, which regarded imagination and instinct as more important than the cold rationalism of ‘scientific knowledge’. Everything he did he saw as poetry: ‘The creation of a road, a school, a nursery – that’s poetry!’ His writing combines earnestness with a rigorous anti-sentimentalism and a love of ...”

“... Familiarity,​ oddly enough, is all too often an obstacle to historical understanding. The more we think we know about a period, the more preconceptions we have. In the case of the Napoleonic Wars, a patriotic mythology fixated on the achievements of Nelson, Wellington and Sir John Moore at Corunna tends to filter out fear and uncertainty in favour of a seemingly inevitable procession of victories ...”

“... scheme; they are apparently not in danger of being blown off an empirical, descriptive course as more elaborately constructed or more didactic novels might be. Nabokov’s sneer about using novels as evidence about society is misplaced: novels do contain veridical information about a non-problematic reality. The rawest ...”

“... in particular must have given many a happy hour to rhetoricians since his works were exhumed, in a more innocent spirit, by Lamb and his contemporaries. It is in this essay that Empson first puts in a decisive appearance. Seven Types of Ambiguity is one of the few first-class critical works of the century; it has changed the way in which even people who do not ...”

“... present century. Devotion to the legislature on this heroic scale has a predictable appeal for the more serious-minded of its personnel. The project was championed in the past by Harold Macmillan and is protected now by the enthusiasm of men such as Roy Jenkins and Robert Rhodes James. But why should those of us who are excluded from this desirable club at ...”