“... to be at least partly fictional (A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy’s Triumphant Story by ‘Anthony Godby Johnson’, The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things by ‘J.T. LeRoy’, Kathy’s Story by Kathy O’Beirne), people felt aggrieved. They didn’t want imagined misery: no matter the quality of the imagination, they wanted experienced misery as ...”

“... dystopianism. Certainly Sabbath’s Theatre and The Dying Animal display unflagging energy. Anthony Burgess reports somewhere a schoolmate’s recommendation to him of the plays of Shakespeare – ‘It’s all fighting and fucking tarts!’ – and the same might be said, with less enthusiasm, of Roth in extremis. These are not the kinds of thing one ...”

“... She had already scored with a whole bestiary of sacred monsters. Jackson would boast that ‘after King Farouk, Cyril Connolly and George Weidenfeld, I was the pretty one.’ Skelton, like many of his wives and lovers and Jackson himself (his brother Vivian too), was besotted with animals. She was particularly in love with her coati, a raccoon-like creature ...”

“... work of many novelists who started publishing fiction in the 1950s – Butor and Murdoch but also Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Muriel Spark and Pynchon – and who were not just trying to make sense of our lives but, as Kermode put it, ‘making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives’.For Murray, ‘a real Pynchon thing’ is the mode of ...”

“... wife and four older children in Warrington, where he had served six terms as mayor. So Ken went to King Edward’s School, got a better education than he would have found at most boarding-schools, grew up heterosexual and entered Magdalen, Oxford in 1945 on a demyship of £50 a year. His spending allowance, ten pounds a week, was larger than that of most ...”

“... To be a patriot was to be a spokesman for the ‘old ways’ of the people against the bad modern king, lords and parliament. Hazlitt mildly criticised this tendency in Cobbett’s left-wing ally, Sir Francis Burdett, who was always ‘wanting to go back to the early times of our Constitution and history in search of the principles of law ...”

“... proving himself a cunning ‘politician’ in the precise pejorative sense used by Shakespeare in King Lear: ‘Get thee glass eyes,/And, like a scurvy politician, seem/To see the things thou dost not.’ So while the message of these texts is clear enough, their provenance makes them hard to interpret. The proportion of truth and invention in them cannot be ...”

“... City by selling to its new arts centre for $50,000 a huge painting entitled The Temptation of St Anthony which consists of a single vertical stripe on a plain ground, utters a startling self-defence: It is a picture of the self-awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal – the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all ...”

“... Chronicles, weren’t seen to count as historical: the play originally printed as The History of King Lear had to be reclassified as a tragedy (just as the erstwhile tragedies of Richard II and Richard III became histories), and was joined by Cymbeline, despite that play’s competing affinities with history and with comedy. Other potential anomalies ...”

“... artists or canonical masterpieces’. There can be no room in such a project for artists such as Anthony Devis, adjudged by Waterhouse to be ‘an altogether minor person’; or those whom it is ‘sufficient to mention’ but unnecessary to discuss; or the numerous and nameless ‘journeymen hacks’ who ‘cannot find a place in a general history of ...”

“... of which his contemporary heroes – the painters I’ve mentioned, or the English sculptor Anthony Caro – were the exponents, Fried seemed set to search out the background to this progressive history. But it’s hardly surprising that, once in the academy, Fried imbibed a different view of history, one that is properly historicist in the sense that ...”

“... instead. It was, to be sure, easier to make these claims of, say, Rainer Maria Rilke than of Anthony Trollope, not to speak of Shopping and Fucking. Like most theories of art, Romanticism and its heirs privileged one particular form of it – in this case, poetry, which had taken up where religion had left off. As I.A. Richards remarked with stunning ...”

“... absent: she also had a habit of physically vanishing. Another of the boyfriends would be King Farouk of Egypt, whom she met while working as a cipher clerk in Cairo in 1944. He liked to flog her with his dressing-gown cord on the steps of his palace. She was dangerously beautiful – the danger being for herself as much as for others. The ‘romantic ...”

“... with the consent and approbation of his master’ and ‘Samuel Baron, son of the African King, Oaramby, alias Johnson’. Two sides of the African presence are revealed here. First, there was a subculture of slave ownership by white masters, although this was illegal under the common law. Newspapers often printed ‘for sale’ or ...”

“... wilderness – sometimes presciently, as on Germany, sometimes ludicrously, as in support of the King over abdication – without getting back into office. From young man in a hurry to old codger going nowhere: his hour on the stage of history seemed to be over. If anything, Ramsden goes further than Rhodes James. In itself 1940 was not a lasting ...”