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“... Labour: the Labour Party under Mr Blair more closely resembles the party of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden than one kitted out for the Nineties. Inevitably, given its strategy, the most obvious characteristic it shares with Very Old Labour is timidity and a wish to be thought acceptable by the existing élites. One form of this is New Labour’s ready ...”

“... a model for royal biography successfully followed by Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, James Pope-Hennessy on Queen Mary and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett on George VI. Now the wheel has come full circle, and we are back to George V again. Is there any need for this? If plain history does not ...”

“... All of this conversation is then enlivened by the regular appearance of Wittgenstein on wheels. Philip Thody and Howard Evans, in their bonhomous Faux Amis and Key Words, are happy to have Wittgenstein say, just like that, that the meaning of a word is its use. But Wittgenstein did not think the matter that simple. Burchfield prefers the more ample and ...”

“... Hull, across the river from his home town. There, supported by colleagues like Richard Hoggart and Philip Larkin, he founded Critical Quarterly, a journal which continues to appeal to a mixed audience of schoolteachers and professional academics. After a year at Berkeley, during which his classes were disrupted by the Free Speech Movement, Cox returned to a ...”

“... courses and mature literary criticism focused upon their work blossom around the world,’ Philip and Carol Zaleski report, but they hedge their bets when passing literary judgment on The Lord of the Rings. ‘His admirers cannot resist comparing him to Dante, Malory, or Blake, with the necessary proviso that Tolkien is incomparable.’ Are they among ...”

“... looks as though Schulz could barely identify himself with reality, let alone with the Jews,’ Philip Roth once observed to Isaac Bashevis Singer. He was using the terms of a famous joke of disavowal in Kafka’s diaries: ‘What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself.’ It’s true that Schulz was born into a Jewish ...”

“... its capital. The town has no characteristics except efficiency and conceit and feeble imitation of French artistic vice, where the vice is doubled and the art dropped.’ Having got half-way through Faust Part One, he reckoned it ‘more a wonderful collection of very good remarks than a dramatic masterpiece’ (to his parents, 27 March 1914). After seeing a ...”

“... happening at once, nobody has time to take much notice – this was all said in the 36 lines of Philip Larkin’s ‘Vers de Société’. While nobody would deny that Coover and his contemporaries opened our horizons twenty years ago, I would see Gerald’s Party as the work of a writer imprisoned in his own success. If this were to be the last of the ...”

“... stone’s throw of his premises is a pharmacist (to whom Mr Sweeney addresses frequent queries), a French bakery for croissants, a florist (from whom Mr Sweeney purchased the wee cacti which became the title poem of his most recent and acclaimed collection), his local public house, the Lamb (for the usual wetgoods), a dry cleaner’s, two coffee shops, a ...”

“... arris, which careful craftsmen will plane down into a chamfer (the origins of these terms are French, ‘arête’ and ‘chanfrein’ respectively) to prevent cutting the fingers that will be drawn irresistibly to its crisp edge. The arris is not, of course, to be confused with an arras or embroidered hanging, through which the unfortunate Polonius gets ...”

“... to expect of this astonishing war. ‘It’s not as unfair as you think,’ advised an experienced French colleague. Accreditation took a few minutes from South Vietnam and, separately, from the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, whose boss, General William Westmoreland, had the Shakespearean sounding title of COMUSMACV. (In the flesh, Westy ...”

“... to find the hotel full of ‘very young rosy-faced English officers on leave with nice young French ladies who clumsily pretend in broken English to be their wives’. This ‘bon ville’ was Cabourg, Proust’s Balbec. Channon dined with Princesse Soutzo: ‘I was between Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau … Proust has always been kind to me and I ...”

“... up new and fresh. When Look back in anger opened at the Royal Court, the warmest reaction was Philip Hope-Wallace’s ‘spinsterly condescension’ – Osborne has always at his command the exact, skewering phrase – but then the Sunday papers came out. Ken Tynan called it a ‘minor miracle’ and praised it in these peculiar terms: ‘I doubt if I ...”

“... to call them roller blades and to think of myself as a blade runner, someone who is waiting for a Philip K. Dick novel to happen in. Specifically, I now glide about in the faster and more graceful Rollerblade Coolblades. These have a moulded and vented polyurethane boot with ratchet fastenings and high-rebound, polyurethane, Kryptonic wheels with sealed ...”

“... poetry would be improved by acquiring, as Pound recommended, the virtues of good prose, preferably French. Stallworthy submitted the Newdigate poem under the pseudonym ‘Phlebas the Phoenician’, but that is the only recognition of Eliot I find in his poetic career. If this is true, I would like to hear more about it; how a poet of Stallworthy’s openness ...”