“... and came to the conclusion that ‘the best mind in England’ belonged to Herbert Read. Cutting short his England trip, he and his wife headed off for Paris (Tate had married the fierce and ultra-Southern novelist, Caroline Gordon, a few years before: he would later marry her again, after a divorce, and then divorce her yet again). In ...”

“... quite suddenly, as I was looking for something else in the back pages of the impeccably learned (read: dry as dust) Review of English Studies for July 1949, there he was: ‘Frank Kermode’. Not, I was interested to note, ‘J.F. Kermode’ or any other variant that signalled the first name he never used. (It was one of the lesser indignities of his time in ...”

“... of nucleoside therapy nor the Vatican’s Bambino Gesù paediatric hospital, nor for that matter Donald Trump, who had begun tweeting offers of help, could alleviate Charlie Gard’s suffering, Great Ormond Street’s medical staff had run a gauntlet of abuse, demonstrations and threats cranked up by religious fundamentalists, but amplified and disseminated ...”

“... allowed his once provincial eye to be led by Brandt. Ray-Jones may have shared his subjects with Donald McGill or Ken Russell but his compositions of simultaneous actions by competing players are stolen from a different world.They are translations. Here is a material example of the ‘alienation’ that possesses multiple meanings from Brecht onwards so that ...”

“... by a blessed ‘St Gugg’ fellowship. While in England she made influential friends such as Donald Hall and the Plath-Hugheses, and published in the New Yorker. Katharine White, the poetry editor, soon offered her a first-read agreement.In the meantime, Rich had broken off her engagement to Sumner Powell, a Wasp ...”

“... very obvious to everybody.’Standing under an array of American flags and two huge banners that read ‘America Leads the World in Testing’, the president declares that the US is testing 300,000 people a day, which is not true, ‘unmatched and unrivalled anywhere in the world and it’s not even close’. When asked by an Asian-American woman journalist ...”

“... the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years.’ Or consider the message read out to Vice President-elect Mike Pence by the cast of Hamilton after he attended a performance: ‘We are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us ...”

“... in universities had created a new reading public, receptive to books which could only be read by people experienced in the routines of classroom explication. The economics of publishing encouraged the production of novels and poems of the kind university instructors would be tempted to write about, thus furthering their careers, and to assign to ...”

“... he wasn’t praising him for any Eliotic or iconoclastic talents, which is part of the reason for Donald Davie’s complaint a few years later that Hardy represented ‘a crucial selling short of the poetic vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell intimated when he said that the two poets ...”

“... to his lack of a public school education, accusing him of ‘unmanliness ... especially after we read in the Times of a mother who said to her hesitating son: “My boy, I don’t want you to go, but if I were you I should.” ’ Vera was equally keen for her brother to join up and Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge believe that her reliance on what they ...”

“... memoir, Lucky Bruce, when Heller’s one-time agent, Candida Donadio, said not to worry – nobody read Gaddis’s novels. In the city, when they wanted company they went to Elaine’s on the Upper East Side, where big book authors dined in the front room while tourists peeped at them from the back room. For something over thirty years that was Heller’s life ...”

“... He also amassed a large collection of books on the subject. Towards the end of his life, he read The Halt Perspective (2016), about the Rendlesham Forest incident of 1980, when several UFOs were spotted over US airbases in East Anglia. After his enthusiasm for this sort of thing came to light, the Sun contacted John Hanson, one of the book’s ...”

“... as a form of individual and collective welfare. What if, I decided, what if, just for once, one read this output as if history mattered and as if the war of ideas was a real thing?For some people, the defining, moulding episode of this moribund century is the Final Solution; for others it is the Gulag, the 1989 revolutions, the Spanish Civil War, the ...”

“... Now I find that once more I have shrunk To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream, I have read in books that art is not easy But no one warned that the mind repeats In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still The black swan of trespass on alien waters. The lines echo the description by A.D. Hope – much revered by McAuley and Stewart – of ...”

“... Grammar, with its fall-back invocation of ‘nonstandard’ (it is not a book likely to be much read by users of nonstandard English), finds itself saying that some usages are ‘nonstandard but widely current’. All of this conversation is then enlivened by the regular appearance of Wittgenstein on wheels. Philip Thody and Howard Evans, in their bonhomous ...”