“... After the bus had passed, the police made concentrated efforts to clear the area, bringing in more officers, including Special Patrol Group officers in vans. Some protesters tried to escape by heading down side streets. Most of these led the demonstrators away from trouble, but Beachcroft Avenue, a narrow residential road, just led onto another ...”

“... done as much for McGahern, who mentions him in a letter to a friend as ‘the one I dealt with, more interested in machine guns than in coffins’. In the novel, when McKiernan asks, ‘You don’t seem to have any interest in our cause?’ Ruttledge replies: ‘No. I don’t like violence.’ It is tempting to read the argument about Northern Ireland that ...”

“... and for me to study his cuff buttons. I found it hard to see the man inside the clothes; and like Thomas Cromwell in my novels, I couldn’t help winding the fabric back onto the bolt and pricing him by the yard. At this ceremony, which was formal and carefully orchestrated, the prince gave an award to a young author who came up on stage in shirtsleeves to ...”

“... on from there to Mytilenean chit-chat. B. and I weren’t yet together – wouldn’t be for five more years – but I was jealous nonetheless when she described the encounter in an email. Blast that Souhami! Not only was she the author of a series of stylish biographies of Rich and Famous Lesbians – Stein and Toklas, Violet Trefusis, Radclyffe Hall, the ...”

“... an instant classic. The second, the masterpiece, has the same characters in it, is much longer and more complicated, and increasingly interested in myth and language games. The third is enormous, mad, unreadable. One answer is Joyce, of course. Another – The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1955), The Silmarillion (1977) – is J.R.R. Tolkien.A ...”

“... Alan Hollinghurst​ ’s tally as a published novelist is six books over 29 years, so that’s more than two thousand pages of astonishing responsiveness to light, sound, painting, the past, social nuance, music, sensation both sexual and otherwise, buildings inside and out, the inner life of sentences – this is only the beginning of a list ...”

“... one of their later outings, Catrine begins a canvas in dull browns, in the style, she declares, of Thomas Cole, who he’d told her not to like: but she has decided to be contrary. Clearly, Catrine doesn’t want to be seen as just another girl. Can’t the teacher reck his own rede? At one point, Gilbert, treading on thin ice, begins to say she reminds him of ...”

“... poem in couplets, of the Byzantine times, that I have,’ and what must he have felt, even more apprehensively, when he received the manuscript – was it ‘The Story of Eudocia’? Wearily he sat down, when he had no energy even for his own work, to write a critique of Dixon’s uninspired couplets, on and on. As usual, Hopkins begins his critique ...”

“... either to purgatory or to eternal punishment in hell. No one believes in eternal punishment any more (except for Islamic fundamentalists and those Christian evangelicals who think Christopher Hitchens will go to hell), but the concept of an afterlife is still hard to throw over. The other day, my parents told me of an ageing friend who had recently ...”

“... They invent the scenes through which they move, and thus invent themselves afresh on every page. More than most fictional heroes, the hero in Hamsun writes the novel we read, plots it for us. Yet, like escaped convicts, these heroes erase their tracks as they proceed, and this seems to be hapless rather than willed: they carry no continuous memory of what ...”

“... one Western spy claimed Ali was ‘very much given to the unspeakable vice, taking pleasure in more than three hundred pageboys’. The habit of sodomy was often supposed to have been acquired from foreigners. ‘Buggery’, the English legal term, derives from ‘Bulgar’, referring to Bulgarian Bogomil heretics, who were accused of elaborate and obscene ...”

“... between ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky’ (line 2 of ‘Prufrock’) and Thomas Hardy’s ‘forms there flung/Against the sky’ (‘The Abbey Mason’); between ‘certain half-deserted streets’ (line 4 of ‘Prufrock’) and ‘he sought out a certain street and number’ in Chapter 20 of Little Dorrit; or, moving beyond ...”

“... Pretty towns with good amenities became prettier and better served still; neglected towns more neglected. Towns that could tick three or four from a list of teaching hospital, university, advanced technology enterprise, successful sports franchise, attractive natural surroundings, mainline train station, cultural prize of national renown and ...”

“... The annotators go on: ‘Technically, Halloran would beget O’Halloran.’ And they tell us more: ‘There are two distinct branches of the O’Hallorans in Ireland, one from Clare and the other from Galway.’ In the Eumaeus episode, when Bloom reads the Evening Telegraph and finds a mention of the funeral of ‘the late Mr Patrick Dignam’ that he ...”

“... the printed substance and its packaging can also be traced, in a kind of zigzag, between the more and less conservative volumes in the set, even within volumes and sections. They are linked to the contradictions which are now, quite productively, muddling the huge bicentenary itself.As an ‘imagined community’, Australia needs ...”