“... tones of the progressive tradition extending from Mark Twain and William Dean Howells through Norman Mailer, Murray Kempton and beyond, you are mistaken. Mencken also wrote this: The educated Negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a Negro. His brain is not fitted for the higher forms of ...”

“... to be exposed early to Greek or Latin, or even to their own language as it existed before the Norman Conquest, tend to find the notion of grammatical case baffling despite the survival in English of a genitive case (renamed possessive) and the distinction between subject and object pronouns in the first and third persons. Evidently, the alleged Irish ...”

“... The books proceed chronologically and democratically, with each style allotted the same space: one page of text and one illustration. Pillar to Post deals with exteriors, Homes Sweet Homes with interiors. Otherwise there is no attempt at fairness, which is fatal to humour. Like his friend and contemporary Kenneth Clark, Lancaster felt the ...”

“... curious about, but there was the simple juju of books. Where would it fall open? (Answer: on page 702, the poem ‘Flight to New York’, perhaps on these appropriate closing lines: ‘the shine and stiffness of a new suit, a feeling,/not wholly happy, of having been reborn.’) Where would the guillotines of the cover fall – would it truly contain ...”

“... tale. Anti-semitism was not uncommon in postwar Britain, whether among the establishment (Montagu Norman, for example, the governor of the Bank of England, was notoriously anti-semitic) or on the street – in 1947 there were anti-semitic riots in several British cities. In 1948, there were race riots of a different kind in Liverpool, when white mobs attacked ...”

“... in these novels, they must be white and have a surname that is either Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Scandinavian or Celtic: Marlowe, Riordan, Sternwood, Ohls, Morgan, Conquest, Potter, Petersen, Haviland. A small number of characters with names that are vaguely Euro-Catholic are grudgingly brought into individual ...”

“... Taylor’s premises, on 28 May, the then Chairman of Manchester’s Police Authority, Councillor Norman Briggs, is informed by James Anderton that Stalker is under investigation, and that Colin Sampson, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, is to take Stalker’s place on the RUC inquiry. Two days later, Briggs announces publicly that he has asked Sampson to ...”

“... Not​ many people have heard of Norman Borlaug, but his invention – the high-yield, short-straw wheat that fuelled the Green Revolution – is consumed every day by the majority of humans on the planet. Without Borlaug’s wheat, there would be no modern food as we know it. Everything from sandwiches to pizza to soy sauce to animal feed is manufactured from wheats adapted from Borlaug’s ...”

“... day, of an entire poem. On this occasion he was reading, with his nose about two inches from the page, a galley of Seamus’s poem in tribute to MacDiarmid, ‘An Invocation’. He asked me if I could see my way clear to getting Professor Heaney on the phone. (Seamus was teaching at Harvard.) I could only hear one side of the conversation, but it went pretty ...”

“... a fucked-out burn-out who still has a seductive way with words. To borrow a word from Norman Mailer, Tynan was a sexologue – an ideologue about sex. He was an admirer of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, about whom he was writing a book-length study (never completed). With his once-voguish theories about armoured personalities and orgone ...”

“... of prejudice and convention, or the merely fashionable attraction of the Left for figures like Norman Podhoretz, who turns out to be really interested simply in Making It) they are coming to the same conclusion from very different angles. Brightman, I think, is tacitly accusing her subject of being obsessed, a trifle perversely, with the personal. McCarthy ...”

“... There are commendably few factual errors, and the sole really glaring one is an editorial slip on page 151, where the photograph captioned ‘Germaine Greer, 1965’ is of a happily unfamous girl called Sheilah Buhr. I was ASM for the touring company of that year’s May Week revue (its title, My Girl Herbert, was, alas, my suggestion) and can remember ...”

“... on these government fixed price contracts ... However, I recognise the Gaddis attitude on page 20, when a man is copying down some meaningless arrangement of Greek letters hewn upon a school portico. ‘Oh, can you read it?’ asks an admirer. ‘Not exactly read it,’ says the snob, ‘but I thought I’d copy it down, it might make a good epigraph ...”

“... on ships. This chapter supersedes all other discussions of the subject in English, and Ray Page, on letters runic and poetic, offers a remarkable example of how an expert can demonstrate the general interest of a very technical topic without sacrifice of scholarly integrity. The Northern World hardly succeeds in its professed purpose, ‘to examine the ...”

“... about the language of architecture; exactness and detail v. mood and feeling. Betjeman wrote to Norman Scarfe to praise his ‘magnificent’ book on Suffolk’s landscape and its history, and each sentence is an attack on Pevsner. ‘You write beautifully. You inform without dehumanising. There is not a hint of art history, thank God, but love of the ...”