“... 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 ...”

“... chronicles with an uncharacteristic lack of curiosity the hesitancy of the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, to strike quickly and hard at the BUF. He records a paper submitted by Anderson to Cabinet a few days before regulation 18B was made, arguing that drastic action was premature, and he quotes the Cabinet minute of the ensuing discussion, which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... gospel’, he means not the real and only one, some sort of competitor for Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but our gospel, the one a sceptical but still God-haunted age might want to build for itself. If you wonder, as I did, what a long-time man of the Left like Saramago is doing with this stuff, the answer lies not in the possible truth or moral authority of ...”

“... the great proconsuls, but young men representatively on the loose – James Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If such men became proconsuls it often diminished rather than brightened their radiance. At that ...”

“... he describes, but on the whole he does not approve of them. He finds the Leveller leader John Lilburne ‘long-winded and conceited’; Rainborowe ‘truculent’ and ‘sour’; William Thompson, who fought to a heroic death in the 1649 Leveller mutiny, ‘at bottom was one of those figures who is familiar in all revolutions; the man of violent or ...”

“... should resist this kind of creeping socialisation. A Belgian musician and designer of automata, John Joseph Merlin, first skated on an early version of roller blades while playing the violin in 1760. But if roller-skating has a long history, it has only a short literature. Unlike cricket, it does not command literary partisans of the calibre of Harold ...”

“... to know. He is often very funny. There are hilarious set-pieces at the expense of, for example, John Braine and Paul Johnson. For the Sake of Argument is not an easy book to précis. There are eight parts and 72 essays, the allocation of which is somewhat random. Most of the pieces in ‘Rogues’ Gallery’, for instance, could go equally well into ...”

“... Irish tradition begins from that point: the language must be worked for all it is worth until, as John Banville’s narrator in his early novel Nightspawn says, ‘we are all up to our balls in paper, and this same testimony would remain: I love words and I hate death. Beyond this, nothing.’ The tradition becomes deeply ironic, loving words for their beauty ...”

“... whole event in some sane perspective? They cannot retreat into a grand carelessness until they are John le Carré or John Fowles. They might begin, however, by running through the list of previous winners and working out how many of the last 19 would feature in any ‘true’ list of Top 19 Novels 1969-87. They might observe ...”

“... of Nations. It is the price of a useful and virtuous existence, of influence and undying fame. John Home’s History of the Rebellion of 1745 was not published until 1802, so Smith may not have seen it (though I bet he did). It contains an account of the meeting between Lochiel and Charles Edward at MacDonald of Boradale’s. Lochiel argued long and hard ...”

“... appointed by the pillars of the Jerusalem Church (James, the brother of Jesus, Peter and John) to take the Christian message from Jerusalem to Rome, with his martyrdom omitted, perhaps to avoid depicting Rome’s opposition to early Christians. And then there is the Paul of the Aprocrypha, one version of which I have quoted. Finally, most important ...”

“... 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 stuff/Up at the holy end’) is a little ...”

“... work or even to lead his readers through a particular poem. Valéry, Allen Tate, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell were instructive in that way. But it is rare for a poet to lead readers through a poem, draft by draft, or explain how he settled for one word rather than another. Yeats did not offer to explain how he got ...”