“... for us now are some very familiar names – Jonathan Culler, Christopher Norris, Annette Lavers, Stephen Heath etc – and under his guidance, we gather, they all got on extremely well, ‘preserving a tone of good humour in the midst of the most serious, even the most fierce, exchanges’. Kermode remained, as he declared in Continuities, ‘more in favour ...”

“... arresting picture of a writer in Peterley Harvest is that of A.E. Housman delivering his Leslie Stephen Lecture, ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’. Every fact that Pennington uses, from the date and the time to the presence of Quiller-Couch and Will Spens, the Vice-Chancellor, may once more be checked from works subsequently published, such as The Letters ...”

“... to the principle of national self-determination. And it is hardly the only state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds. In the autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and undermine support for terrorist groups like al-Qaida by halting Israel’s ...”

“... not only stereotyped and tiresome but dated in a way that Leopold Bloom’s responses to women, or Stephen Dedalus’s don’t seem dated. There is no element of richness or surprise, and there is a terrible ironic distance and jauntiness (more noticeable in The Luck of Ginger Coffey and The Emperor of Ice-Cream). Clearly, the passage quoted above could not be ...”

“... the false dichotomy between Nixon the foreign-policy maestro and Nixon the employer of regrettable sharp practices on the domestic front. What we call ‘Watergate’ was the belated and in some ways accidental revenge for a whole series of foreign policy crimes and blunders. The Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CREEP, was the repository of an entire ...”

“... Zero in 1972). Ten of the pieces these two books collect have already appeared in English in Stephen Heath’s valuable selection Image-Music-Text, and three are also to be found in Sontag’s anthology. An editor’s note to The Responsibility of Forms manages to miscount these previously translated items, and to turn Heath’s text into a test. It also ...”

“... drivel about Mrs Stone. It is, well, pathetic.’ A month later, he was not pleased by Stephen Spender’s World within World: ‘What a spurious book – him and his homosexual affairs that were only “undertaken in a spirit of opportunism”. I’ll say. Seriously though, it makes me hopping mad.’ Two years later he saw The Confidential Clerk ...”

“... it virtually blows up. After a whale is killed in the Antarctic, it is eviscerated with a long, sharp flensing knife. The entire length of the whale’s body cavity is opened up so that the icy water can wash it thoroughly. Then it’s tied tail-first to the bow of the catcher boat and dragged back to the factory ship, where it will be hauled aboard and cut ...”

“... on me like a goad, a stone in the shoe. I had the notion that somewhere behind and beyond the sharp-eyed sociological expeditions she undertakes was a General Theory of Everything. A resolution of that terrible inundation coming from all sides at once: our ultimate ecological, cultural, financial and moral collapse. Entropy: GET IT DONE! We seem to have ...”

“... the murky side of the ancient world. Earlier rationalists were sometimes either too learned or too sharp to preserve the inherited blindness. Frazer’s The Golden Bough itself is in some ways a 19th-century rationalist work, finding the courage to be critical of antiquity for its very failures in enlightenment. Time and time again, Frazer can sound like ...”

“... lost their lovely wives, and from time to time a shot would ring out in the evening, a sharp sign of disappointed love. Of course I could arrange these precious scraps of life to stand on their own artistically. But what was I to do? Every time I tried to reconstruct those forgotten resorts, I had visions of the trains and the camps, and my most ...”

“... of the USA, credit-rich geeks, surfers with trembling fingers. The ones who are currently sampling Stephen King. When the investment pays off, the nouveau plutocrats buy into old-fashioned bricks and mortar. Property prices soar. Clerkenwell booms from the Euro-rinsed Smithfield meat market, through Cloth Fair, back to Hoxton and Shoreditch. The psychic ...”

“... the NEC’s rulings on the franchise for the leadership election. There was also a partisan edge, sharp against all the good feeling: one older man stood up and shouted that Saving Labour, the group set up to mobilise party members opposed to Corbyn, was out to ‘destroy any form of socialist thought. They are the enemy within.’ My Irish friend recommended ...”

“... himself is inhuman enough, but on a lower level of being, as he is aware. He is infernal but cold, sharp, precise, business-like. The very fact that he is greedy to make use of Stavrogin, once the possibility has occurred to him, is typical of the economics of his mind. ‘You will be the leader, I will be your secretary,’ he tells him at one point, showing ...”

“... dignified, easy-paced, pedagogic. He instructs, he remembers, he references: books on fire by Stephen Pyne of Phoenix, Arizona; a text called Primeval Forest by ‘a biology guy’ called Chris Maser; articles from the Nation on food stamps. Like many American poets inspired by open-field poetics – the monologues, essays and never-ending exchanges of ...”