“... it is right to report angry comments made by a colleague about a third person – comments which may have been regretted as soon as made. Should I, for example, now report comments made to me about Barbara by people who, to judge from this book, she thought were her admirers? After all, perhaps they were her admirers, despite momentary irritation. Barbara ...”

“... supported by Futility, does not seem a strong enough base on which to rebuild a reputation. It may even reinforce the old view that Gerhardie was no more than a quite interesting and rather peculiar kind of failure. In fact, everybody interested in good novels should read him. I speak as a new convert, for although I read Futility forty years ago I knew ...”

“... is no avoiding the fact that he battened on the great unblushingly. To modern readers this may seem degrading and regrettable.’ Carey, worldly and wise, knows better. But the rhetorical sleight is there in ‘to modern readers’, as if it would be an anachronism to attribute to Donne’s contemporaries any principled censure of those who batten on ...”

“... the dead while at His feet God the Father is creating Adam and Eve.’ Vasari’s doctrinal doubts may be the reason for his faint praise of the composition. In the Mannerist figures, he sees ‘nothing of that skill and singular grace’ Pontormo had previously displayed: Jacopo, it seems to me, has not observed in any single place the organisation of ...”

“... inevitable. The would-be poet, essayist, novelist or dramatist, Johnson repeatedly suggests, ‘may be considered as a kind of general challenger, whom everyone has a right to attack … To commence author is to claim praise, and no man can justly aspire to honour, but at the hazard of disgrace.’ At once heroic and faintly absurd, this quixotic vision of ...”

“... and textual criticism, their classical revival style was profoundly retardataire. Petrarch may have pinned his hopes for literary immortality on works like his Latin epic Africa, but it was his vernacular Canzoniere that launched an international craze for sonnets, keeping the courtly love lyric in vogue for two more centuries. The runaway popularity ...”

“... Organisation of Apocryphal Power, run by a fiendish translator named Ermes Marana, whose purpose may or may not be the subversion of fiction itself. The OAP is vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon’s underground postal service, the Tristero System, and almost certainly has covert links with Buñuel’s Revolutionary Army ...”

“... with him or her. And here the special token of love is that ‘it’ that wants to be found. We may remember from twenty years ago in Rabbit, run Harry’s vision of ‘this thing that wasn’t there’: ‘What is it? Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?’ Harry, of course, has many sentimental moments in these ...”

“... told in The Borrowers), being ‘nearly two feet high, would seem a giant to a Borrower’: this may refer to some real-life dwarf to whom the name was attached, like the famous Charles Stratton, ‘General Tom Thumb’, for the Tom Thumb of early ballad or folk-tradition was sometimes literally ‘but an inch in height’. It’s essential for little people ...”

“... itself from question or control, and bounded only by physical necessity – not infallible, for it may do wrong; but irresistible.’ And in 1776 Bentham launched his attack on ‘unmeaning’ statements: there were no ‘assignable bounds to the supreme power’ in a state. ‘To say that there is any act that they [Parliament] cannot do, to speak of any ...”

“... of this wish – that republican authority should once and for all supplant paternal authority – may now feel difficult to enter into. It should not therefore be dismissed as affectation. These moods run in fevers that acquire ingenuousness by being shared. A seductive cant of fellowship urged the project on its way, a style of conspicuous sincerity that ...”

“... that what they don’t know is the deep, secret, missing truth. In less paranoid ages ignorance may just be ignorance. Underworld , like Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon , is in this sense a post-paranoid novel. When one of DeLillo’s characters thinks of ‘the paranoid élite’, we are meant to catch the friendly irony, the flicker of nostalgia. These ...”

“... Joseph Mitchell, who died on 24 May 1996, was a staff writer on the New Yorker for 58 years and belonged to the band of contributors who made the magazine’s reputation. His special subject was the sea: he shared Herman Melville’s vision of New York as a city of the sea, ‘your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted around by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs ...”

“... of news creation and distribution. Like everything associated with him (including, one may predict, his imminent disappearance from the scene), it has happened very fast. He is 31 years old, and has been in full-time business three years. He was born in Washington DC, the offspring of ‘liberal’ parents: his father, as Matt recalls, was ‘one ...”

“... language Nietzsche uses to characterise the discourse of the Apollonian and Dionysian may have had a seductive power for Rothko: “illusion”, “hallucinations”, “dream”, “veils”, “mirror”, “reflections”, “essence and appearance”, “the sublime, which subjugates terror by means of art”’. This is literary talk, not ...”