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“... Lady Diana Cooper is capable of saying anything, if she thinks you are dumb enough to swallow it. Philip Ziegler has reason to consider himself astute, but he perhaps ruled out too soon the possibility that the queen of the put-on had spotted the ideal patsy. The chief lacuna in an otherwise interesting book is its failure adequately to convey the heroine’s ...”

“... holidays, the central ‘event’, which might have been got up in prose by almost any indifferent short-story writer, is the disillusion of Jennifer, aged twelve or so, when she finds that this summer she is no longer the little favourite on the beach. And here it was the tragedy began. That life-long tragedy to Jennifer Which ate into her soul and made her ...”

“... to feel the constraints which these agreements brought in their wake. The socialist leader, André Philip, had foreseen these difficulties. In a sequence of somewhat hectoring letters to de Gaulle, he claimed that de Gaulle would enjoy wide popularity when he arrived in Paris, but that within three months of the Liberation, the difficulties of governing and ...”

“... wit and hidden political mischief, C.S. Lewis when his eye was on the story. And then there was Philip Pullman – whom I met first in his delightful retelling of Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp (1993), and then in the cosmically ambitious His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000). I am no doubt unusually central to the target zone of fiction that pours Milton ...”

“... own personal brand of Marxism, though he relates it carefully to Marx’s own works, and he gives short shrift to his Marxist predecessors in the field. George Thomson, whose Aeschylus and Athens excited me very much when it came out in 1940, is dismissed in three curt sentences. But Dr de Ste Croix is no less critical of his fellow Classical ...”

“... Rachel Cusk recently wrote a piece for the Guardian describing her short-lived membership of a book group: ‘As if for the first time, I understood that reading is a private matter.’ Her co-readers’ inadequate responses to Chekhov provoke some grim reflections on the inadequacies of contemporary readers and writers ...”

“... about him, like his first name or where he lived, or how he paid for his smart jackets and too short trousers. He bowed a lot and lifted his hat, he walked like a kangaroo trained by Groucho Marx, everything he touched went wrong or wild, like the shed full of fireworks in the movie. Everything except his tennis serve, that is, which looked like a wind-up ...”

“... insolent and immune, where its existence is never guessed’ (that’s Proust, of course). With Philip Hensher, there’s no question of having to crank up an interest outside his constituency, since homosexuality has until now played a relatively small part in his fiction. The Northern Clemency (2008) showed an extraordinary flair for building up the large ...”

“... mortality; studies of the theoretical support for a government approach like monetary policy; short inquiries into topical issues such as the future of Promenade Concerts and the Mexico summit; examinations of the administration of departments such as the Manpower Services Commission; and regular monitoring of government expenditure and economic ...”

“... On 23 April 1977 Philip Larkin came to lunch at Barbara Pym’s cottage in Finstock, near Oxford. She and her sister had only been living there a short while, after Pym’s retirement from her post in Fetter Lane as assistant editor of Africa; and it was Larkin’s first and, as it turned out, his only visit ...”

“... a dozen books of stories, poems and plays. Despite recent republications and the efforts of Philip Roughton (the Iceland-based translator who has also translated this biography) to bring out new books and retranslations in English, most of Laxness remains inaccessible. Probably he’s too inconsistent and circumstantial and spur-of-the-moment for ...”

“... offspring of his apprentice years?’ Jon Stallworthy asks in the afterword to Singing School. His short answer is: ‘because, to the best of my knowledge, no one else has done so, and the schooling of poets seems a potentially rewarding subject.’ The longer answer is that ‘in the early chapters of their ...”

“... Solaris (1961), Return from the Stars (1961), The Invincible (1964), Fiasco (1986) and innumerable short stories about an interstellar navigator called Pirx. That’s to say, a 20th-century ‘Hard SF’ writer, one with visionary gifts and inexhaustible diligence when it came to the task of ‘extrapolation’.Hard SF is the tradition originating not in Mary ...”

“... lanky, nose pointed, chin receding, is the type of the aristocratic English silly ass; Napoleon, short, dark, goggle-eyed, that of the greasy wop in some Little England bestiary. But they are much more than stereotypes: each is also a portrait. Gillray’s genius for satiric likeness peoples his stage with human beings, not with the puppets of lesser ...”

“... fiction, but in several passages Ricks nearly forgets Beckett, and fixes his attention on Philip Larkin, Hardy, Swift, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Christina Rossetti or another. I can’t believe that he chose to deliver these Clarendon Lectures as a hodge-podge. It is more probable that he observed the impressionism that Beckett ascribed to ...”