“... been rising out of my past to express surprise that I ever should have amounted to anything. You may not believe it but I am going to have to thank one fellow for remembering the days of ’81 when we went to kindergarten together and once cut up a snake into very small pieces to see if contrary to the known laws of nature we couldn’t make it stop ...”

“... mountains of glossy Australiana now on offer – the bookshops burst, the coffee-tables groan – may be less than obvious. The anthropologist Annette Hamilton, reviewing Australians to 1788, judges that excellent volume disappointing, not so much in what it says and shows of precontact Aboriginality, but in the limitation of its address to readers who are ...”

“... depends on a successful resolution of two sets of questions. The first seems to be formulated by Richard Titmuss in The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. Titmuss draws a distinction between Britain, where all fresh blood donation was voluntary, a gift to the community and hence an expression of concern with the general good; and the ...”

“... was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or ...”

“... conceded later that there was something ‘morally repugnant’ about this – some of his reports may have affected his targets’ careers – but also said that ‘somebody has to clean the drains’: he thought what he did was ‘necessary’ while the Soviet Union remained a threat. He bolted from Oxford – this time to marry his long-term girlfriend, Ann ...”

“... to write up a pretty good ‘pastiche of [his guests’] conversational style’. History may beg to differ. The early recordings are painfully stagey. The first, from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s ...”

“... lecture, that ‘it is valuable to understand the poetry of the 17th century, in order that we may understand that of our own time and understand ourselves’ was one for which, in 1926, there was a fit audience, even though few. But how to go about understanding it in just this way – that is, with a view to understanding ourselves (scil. the mess we’d ...”

“... relegation of the topic to the relatively safe domain of metaphor is part of a tendency which may be seen in other writers, whether or not for similar reasons. Freudian discussions, so far as I know, do not normally raise the question of whether the use of cannibal metaphors might be implicated in a deep cultural reticence about the literal deed. In ...”

“... and in this its title supports me, for, though West is discussing Robert Elsmere, The Case of Richard Meynell and Daphne, the ethos that Mrs Humphry Ward puts forward is the only thing that really interests her. Even when she comments that on every relevant page the face of the heroine Catherine Leyburn ‘works with emotion and is illuminated by a ...”

“... mortally ill. He never saw their publication, nor were they published in Russia: he sent them to Richard Gregory in England. They will appear in Gregory’s Oxford Companion to the Mind. Inner difficulties and outer difficulties match each other here. It is not only difficult, it is impossible for patients with certain right-hemisphere syndromes to know ...”

“... watched their tongues when he was around. The rest, if they thought about it, imagined ‘Richard’ probably had to sign some nasty piece of paper in order to get out of Poland: so bloody what? After reading Domosławski’s compelling, exhaustive and often upsetting book, their easy tolerance – like mine – begins to look different. In the first ...”

“... Great Tradition – based on articles that first appeared in Scrutiny in the 1930s and 1940s – may begin by telling you the names of ‘the great English novelists’ (Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad), but the opening chapter then takes us through the failings of those who came before them. Defoe ‘matters little as an influence’. Fielding existed to make ...”

“... we last see her, she has hesitantly embarked on a career in television.) But while Frederica may have no intention of writing that ‘long novel by Proust out of George Eliot’, the long novels in which she figures are clearly marked by the genetic traces of that improbable couple – although their bloodlines have been hopelessly complicated by an ...”

“... going. ‘We were blocked in the town, and at night they terrorised other villages.’ Then in mid-May there was a rumour that the KLA planned to attack the police and Albanians were advised to leave to avoid reprisals. The majority did, decamping to Malishevo and neighbouring villages to live with relatives and friends. Sherif Gashi, a retired primary school ...”

“... in what is given to few writers and poor in what is given to most men’ (D.J. Enright). We may sneakily feel it appropriate that Nabokov the mandarin spent the last two decades of his life in a hotel suite in Montreux – after all, this lofty, cold, smug, politically neutral figure is himself a kind of one-man Switzerland. The trouble with this image ...”