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“... eyed askance or turned askew. Like Dedalus in the Irish National Library, trying to impress A.E., John Eglinton and Mr Best with his theory of Hamlet, the narrator of Nothing Like the Sun throws in lots of local colour, freely kitsched with quasi-Elizabethan compounds and archaic turns of phrase. Moreover, following Dedalus’s example in Ulysses, Burgess ...”

“... a used Johnnie,’ she added – this being the name by which former members of St John’s College, Oxford, refer to themselves. We knew that because both of us were also, to use the posh term, Johnians. The LRB asked Blair to write a piece, and he did. Its left-is-best vibe makes entertaining reading now, but it’s well written and at least ...”

“... Deep in the Valley rich soil drives the mechanism. Grain spills from the husks. Despite the season of recovery, the family is forced to sell up – a lost century becomes a dynasty and the rich soil becomes polluted. They’ve cleared and shaped the place, a portrait of themselves. On a summer evening they’ll look out over the paddocks, over burnt stubble, over stands of mallee, through a flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos, into the rich red sunset ...”

“... A single drop fills the rainbow glass. The fountain overflows. How come the purr and passing of this every night arrives at stealth? Just – be prepared. If it happens every day around this time it happens more than twice. I’d wager this one has nothing in it. So’s your old man. We get called out often on all kinds of suspicious business, he decried ...”

“... The Welkin We’re patching up an agreement today. The insides won’t let us. I sent you copies by return mail any time soon. We came to a long Q and A period, to which dreams are the smutty alternative. Of these by far the most startling (not to be tedious) combat greasiness from Calexico to Texarkana, a splash on everything they do. They can’t fit it in ...”

“... Days like Today Sometimes, on Sundays, they walk a little ways into the oval spell others are soft on. She, a maid, unknown to terror, rising out of the ridge, its spreading cedars bemused and endearing. The ancestors have never been influenced by any kind of logic, not even a shrike’s, and now I can’t even say what a hornet’s-eye view of this catastrophe might englobe, if we were all brothers and near to one another ...”

“... Beyond Albany and Syracuse …’ As handwriting sprawls a page, revealing much about the writer’s psyche, so too these lemons, dividends of peace, in our time, my friend. Don’t stagger the bejesus out of the old harness, play with the dog, who yaps afresh at any pretext of the blond air, or stifle the air’s partisans, the moments. Hard to pin down when the motorcade stopped before your house ...”

“... Hydrodamalis Gigas after G.W. Steller These beasts are four fathoms long, but perfectly gentle. They roam the shallower waters like sea-cattle and graze on the waving flags of kelp. At the slightest wound their innards will flop out with a great hissing sound, but they haven’t yet grown to fear mankind: no matter how many of their number might be killed, they never try to swim away – they are so mild ...”

“... at the time of the 2015 election. This is the outcome which has been argued for by the Tory MP John Stevenson, who is Scottish, but represents a constituency in the north of England. ‘You can’t have a situation where the government of the United Kingdom is determined by the representation from Scotland, which could then have significant influence in ...”

“... To her the kissing group of husbands and wives was like a gang of schoolgirls in the laundry, all fuss and bother, no proper theory of how sexuality is conditioned by the economic strictures of society and not by the games shows and the sporting programmes or by the lies that stain the pages of cheap paper, for example, when her friends told her she was a rotten writer plumping up the pillow of her conventional emotions so she could feel in love temporarily click on click off and revel in a moody air in the kitchen, scribbling diary entries as though they were great roiling thoughts or worse, riveting literature meant to be read out during the long night of the adult education course training tapping dogs to do the new job, it’s obviously made for love, this mechanical device with its ribbon spooling out reams of confectionery and duplicity that young women desperately want to believe could happen to them, like doctors who are stern and rich – no, will happen to them – and the pretty nurses who are young and whimpering, but somehow dazzling, the same story, only glowing with a more literary quality – what the fuck – now it happens, only the ending is wrong, and the hero, called Kevin or Duane, is a loser – there are no doctors here, they live elsewhere with their wives, their investments, and their matched pairs of children ...”

“... for Lucas There is too much light in the world to bear the weight of Euclid, too much fog, with shore birds, bright in the salt-water channels thinning the sands, the Black-Tailed Godwit, the Curlew Sandpiper, named from the field guide, but still uncertain, still defiantly heraldic. I’ve lived through days like these before and scarcely noticed, skylarks hidden in my sleeves, whole afternoons of stork and oriole ...”

“... darkest period of his mourning. The volume includes letters to Joseph Priestley, Thomas Lawrence, John Thelwall, Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as ...”

“... poet who had some capital. But the firm only took off with the acquisition a few years later of John Hotten’s, Henry Bohn’s and John Maxwell’s publishing properties. Macmillan absorbed the house of Bentley in 1898; Murray absorbed Smith, Elder in 1917; between the wars, according to Ian Norrie, Hutchinson ...”

“... of assuming an audience ‘both universal and homogeneous’. The pamphlet was quoted recently by John Gross in an afterword to a new edition of his book The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters.* Gross assumed a combative stance, calling his piece ‘the man of letters in a closed shop’, and speaking of the ‘cold horror’ that filled him when he ...”

“... is never left unadorned by epithet: ‘the sour-stomached Thomas Carlyle’, ‘the flamboyant John Elliotson’, ‘the one-eyed, gold-waistcoated, civic-skewering Robert Knox’, ‘the humane mad-doctor John Conolly’, ‘the bombastic Ernst Haeckel’. If Desmond gave us time to think about it, one might wonder ...”