“... In​ the mid-seventh century, a busy and well-connected abbess in Northumbria took a promising new poet under her wing. This unassuming elderly man, who worked as a cowherd, had never managed to learn a single song. He went to feasts with the other agricultural workers at the monastery, but always left before the harp could be passed to him ...”

“... and had probably already been written about. The material was also going to be sliced wafer thin. John Costello and Oleg Tsarev had already engaged to write about Alexander Orlov and reveal him as the éminence grise behind the Cambridge ring. It was proposed that I should collaborate with former Colonel Yuri Modin and do the Cambridge ring in the post-war ...”

“... dim sense of underachievement. ‘Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face,’ wrote John Updike in Self-Consciousness, a metaphor which gives a startling tilt to our assumptions about fame and its consequences. In a bravura feat of imaginative reconstruction Gordon Burn has taken the idea of celebrity-as-affliction a step further and pursued one ...”

“... shared faith broken, a Christian community irreparably divided. This was how the London annalist John Stow, who lived through the entire process, understood it, with much nostalgic mourning for all those seasonal rituals and festivals and the social reconciliation they symbolised, a slightly more sophisticated version of the common saying that it was a merry ...”

“... conflict in, and about, Northern Ireland has renewed a struggle for cultural hegemony that took various forms in 19th and early 20th-century Ireland. The anthology rehearses those earlier debates and is itself a hegemonic attempt: a heavy-gun emplacement on a Kulturkampf which has engaged Irish literary critics, historians and some writers during the ...”

“... been known to scholars for some time and which include the Gospel of Mary and the Apocryphon of John, they are the first large-scale and direct presentation of Gnostic beliefs: hitherto nearly all our knowledge has come from the descriptions (abusive but on the whole accurate) and excerpts given by their orthodox opponents. The roots of Gnosticism, a widely ...”

“... came the Second World War and a sudden upsurge in reputation, with Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, John Piper, Kenneth Clark, John Lehmann and others going hysterical about her: a kind of trendy Stringalong situation, we are invited to judge. Then by 1954 it is all over and the balloon deflated for good. Can my dislike of ...”

“... English acquaintance have written brief, anecdotal accounts based on their memories of him – John St John’s To the War with Waugh has 56 pages, Frances Donaldson’s Portrait of a Country Neighbour 118, while those collected in Evelyn Waugh and his World are naturally shorter still. It is true that Alec Waugh ...”

“... best we have’. He has called Emma Donoghue ‘one of the great literary ventriloquists’ and John Boyne ‘one of the great craftsmen in contemporary literature’. Gerard Donovan reminds him of ‘other great writers, not least Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka and … Bernhard Schlink’. McCann is the high priest of high praise, always handy with a ...”

“... John Banville’s heroes seem to be in search of a centre or subject for their ruminations. Ghosts pester them; voices ring in their ears. Something vital has gone wrong and they must take account of it. ‘I have the feeling,’ Alex Cleave declared in Banville’s last book, Eclipse, ‘the conviction, I can’t rid myself of it, that something has happened, something dreadful, and I haven’t taken sufficient notice, haven’t paid due regard, because I don’t know what it is ...”

“... that in the 1650s the Book of Common Prayer was used at least in the churches to which his mother took him, although it was officially prohibited. In the last 18 months of his life Rochester had a correspondence with Charles Blount the deist, on whom Mr Treglown is perhaps a little severe. Only Blount’s letters survive, and they do seem rather ...”

“... protest and indignation would have been both intelligible and warranted. But what in fact took place was not a dramatic imposition of inquisitorial restraints on a scholar. Dr Küng occupied a chair of Catholic theology in which he could only discharge his duties by teaching not just about Catholic theology – which could be done perfectly adequately ...”

“... In John Cheever’s​ Bullet Park (1969), Eliot Nailles, a mild-mannered advertising executive, is asked by an Italian doctor: ‘Why do Americans want to be immortal?’ Amie Barrodale’s first novel, Trip, offers a playful reformulation of this question. In some ways, it’s a send-up of a culture obsessed with ‘healthmaxxing’, where ageing and death are treated as intolerable embarrassments ...”

“... This is a weakness which he shares with Philip Larkin and with Larkin’s American contemporary John Berryman – two marvellous poets, but men who perhaps took too much delight in presenting themselves as forthright and illusion-free souls; although Larkin’s tough talk (‘before I snuff it’, ‘some brass and ...”

“... Britain; and as for his direct influence, as one observes it in Sickert, Wilson Steer, Gwen John and Victor Pasmore, it is hard not to think of it as beneficent and inspiring. People sometimes rebuke Whistler, as they rebuke Pound, for being noisy and obstreperous, but the polemics – the Ruskin trial, and the ‘Ten O’Clock’ lecture (reprinted in ...”