“... to do heavy housework in the nude (with the odd lash if he bungles it), a third will carry a page of dialogue which he will want his girl to read out with him: the climax comes when she beats him for not washing out his ears. When Cynthia describes these goings-on she sounds like some kindly old repertory bore: director, stage manager and wardrobe ...”

“... however choice some of the titbits, could have made a dull book. In fact, there is seldom a dull page, because Gay writes with lucidity, elegance and an affectionate relish for the quirks, twists, stratagems, evasions, paradoxes and ambiguities of the middle-class mind, which is at once universal and his own. The description of that mind in the terms of ...”

“... the best word possible’. Implicitly he was talking about subject, object, modifier, but on the page you can see him working his queerest alchemy in the more obscure realm of tense. His reluctance to analyse his style publicly is in inverse proportion to the degree by which he must analyse it privately in writing it; only a writer very confident in his ...”

“... Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, the Atomists, Aristotle, the Stoics. (An epilogue spends a page or two on Galen.) The final score is Creationists 5, Critics 2. Many scholars have thought that one of the achievements of the earliest Greek philosophers was to give a godless account of the origins and nature of the world: they weren’t atheists, they ...”

“... of my poetry.’ Despite this, it would be H.D. who inspired Pound’s Imagism. Fifty years later Norman Holmes Pearson wrote to her: ‘If there is a single person to whom Ezra has been constant (don’t laugh, my dear) it is you.’ After a series of academic debacles – and a broken engagement to H.D. – Pound set out for London in 1908, at the age of ...”

“... desire polish – and still more polish – But the reader coming after him, and dashing over his page, will unconsciously find that the polished words are unnatural. The grating of the file will annoy his ears, the smell of the oil will offend his nose. This is one of the few examples of practical criticism found in Trollope’s letters, and it is of a ...”

“... literature, a degree of sophistication more easily found in an 11th-century monastery than at a Norman court. But the story reads like a fable; it’s full of the bears, dogs, horses and donkeys that populate Aesop’s tales. It’s possible that its dedicatee, Archbishop Robert, presided over a cathedral school at Rouen. More pertinently, after detailing ...”

“... the earliest extant literary telling of this phantom army, taken down by Orderic Vitalis, an Anglo-Norman monk, from the report of his colleague, the eyewitness. Walchelin related how he thought he wouldn’t be believed if he didn’t bring back proof, so he left his hiding place and tried to catch and mount one of the riderless black horses going by: the ...”

“... offered various ‘reasons’ for this cynical charade. Fortunately for posterity, their colleague Norman Tebbit spelt the issue out quite clearly at an enthusiastic meeting of the London Conservatives in 1984: The Labour Party is the party of division. In its present form it represents a threat to the democratic values and institutions on which our ...”

“... Front or about the experiences of ordinary men and women, thanks to the work of historians such as Norman Stone, Hew Strachan, Annette Becker and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau. With Cataclysm, David Stevenson draws on much recent work to provide a comprehensive account of the war, with a welcome interest both in the non-European theatres and in the home fronts. His ...”

“... chroniclers of that process, in full awareness of the ambiguity of the verb ‘to forge’. As Norman Mailer used vociferously to demand, who will analyse the analysts, if not the artist? Philip Roth, like John Updike, is a survivor from the glory days of the heavyweights, the Hemingways and the Faulkners and the Bellows. His first book, the story ...”

“... it from traditional Toryism? And will it work? Mrs Thatcher is keen that we turn back the page to those inter-war figures, Ludwig von Mises and Friederich von Hayek, and see things through their lens. Ironically, in understanding Thatcherism the best place to start is with the collapse of German conservatism in the Thirties and the concomitant rise of ...”

“... to serious non-fiction, from the days of André Maurois’s romanticised version of Shelley to Norman Mailer’s pastiche of Marilyn Monroe, have seemed more dubious. With Peterley Harvest there was an additional problem because, unlike recent fictional diaries such as Nazi Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional ...”

“... the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set ...”

“... years most children leave home.Gorey’s guest, however, neither grows up nor leaves. The last page shows the family, whose human son has become an adult complete with moustache, standing in a conversational group. None of them is looking at the guest, who is still the same size and sits on a tasselled pouffe staring blankly in the opposite ...”