“... among the Hawthornes, James’s tribute to the ‘domestic affections’ falls equally wide of the mark. Herbert does not refuse to believe in the Hawthornes’ tender feelings for one another, but he insists on the rage and terror that must have accompanied such tenderness, on the deep anxieties that, in his view, inevitably haunted the peaceful arrangements ...”

“... Put his graphic versions of his poems alongside printed versions and the reason becomes clear: O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. The poem gains when printed plain. The richly dressed text, to the frustration of the ...”

“... first person and based on the author’s own experience.’ That is astute but it oversteps the mark. After all, nearly all first novels are by writers about whom nothing is known. If they become famous it is because of their novels. Sassoon, on the other hand, was already famous. Everyone knew that he was the war hero who in 1917 had chucked his medals ...”

“... who made Woodstock happen, has a habit of surfacing at Woodstock birthdays: one book to mark the tenth anniversary, another to mark the fortieth, a couple of namesake concerts and now a coffee-table volume of photos from the 1969 festival, plus brief explanatory notes. Earlier this year he announced the line-up ...”

“... cingulum that was every fighting man’s pride, the sign that he was a soldier. No headstone would mark his grave – there was no one for miles to do the carving and, besides, headstones had been falling out of fashion for centuries. Only the memory of the young soldier would remain, fixed in the minds of onlookers by the spectacle, by the precious things ...”

“... has opened up a space for ‘supercharged expressionism’. Unfortunately, tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, innocent about politics to the point of cluelessness, regard themselves as enhancers of democracy, not the problem but the solution. Here Runciman identifies a cluster of developments which might, cumulatively, destroy democracy: an arcadian nerd ...”

“... the next few years in various other essays and reviews, the best of which are brought together in Mark Blacklock’s new edition of the journalism. Ballard’s view was that science fiction should get over its ‘juvenile’ fixation on outer space and concentrate instead on ‘inner space’ – an imaginative zone where ‘the inner world of the mind and ...”

“... in his own life between the working-class boy from Hebden Bridge and the glory to which he rose: ‘He spoke of his miner father coughing up his pneumoconiosis in the next bedroom to himself at home and of the 18 constituents who had died when their cage crashed in carnage to the bottom of Markham shaft the previous August. We were of an age and we ...”

“... became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it’) has of course left its mark here as elsewhere, notably in the form of one-way systems of the kind Birmingham recently took to their logical conclusion when the city was turned into a race-track. But despite all the free demolition work by the two rival firms, the Seventies have dealt ...”

“... out, and was replaced by another, much more mystical and occult, as one sees from the Salon de la Rose + Croix. Goldwater makes some fine distinctions between Symbolism and Art Nouveau: there are similarities of line, but Symbolism alone has the characteristic tension between the idea and its embodiment. ‘Every object is finally only an Idea ...”

“... parade of objects and incidents: a chariot drawn by mice; a crown cut into the turf of the lawn to mark the Emperor’s sleeping-place; palaces of spun-sugar (a pastry-cook was one of his companions in exile) consumed in silence by a group of courtiers in mildewed silks while rats fight under the floorboards. Curiouser and curiouser. Napoleon himself makes ...”

“... mind is the great poem of winter’, demanding the destruction of ‘romantic tenements/Of rose and ice’. But it is also the poet who seems, as one turns the pages of this volume, to have been preparing all his life for the phrase ‘fire-tangled’ which appears at the end of the poem I am about to quote. ‘These comic colors dangled down,’ we ...”

“... holding everyone up, waiting for the tide on the Thames to turn: she knew that when the water rose, boats wouldn’t be able to pass under London Bridge, so no one would be able to take her to the Tower that day. Elizabeth writes that she has been her sister’s most loyal subject ‘from the beginning, and will be to my end’; she sensibly scores out ...”

“... self-impressionists, veracious and subtle (Proust, Woolf), ventriloquists and counterfeiters (‘Mark Rutherford’, the pseudonym used by William Hale White, and, you could add, Edward FitzGerald), foreshadow current developments in autofiction, in which memory acts become, as the filmmaker Chris Marker put it, ‘the lining of forgetting’, where ...”

“... out of your life carries less of a stigma than lager or Grand Theft Auto. It’s understood as a mark of educated cultivation, not wilful indulgence or evasion. Yet reading, like every other exercise of the imagination, can be abused, can turn into an addiction. The connection between this and other kinds of abuse is something that Peter Rushforth has been ...”