“... anagram of 1789. Hazlitt exploited the coincidence in the political direction he favoured, by afterwards suggesting that the Lyrical Ballads was to English poetry what the Fall of the Bastille was to the Ancien Régime. Yet the volume was not so interpreted by contemporaries on its appearance in September 1798, when ...”

“... calls Jigsaw, which has to do with her own early life, ‘a biographical novel’; and it may not be a coincidence that the book’s most sympathetic reviewers have been those who seem already to know her life story. ‘Truth,’ one of the characters remarks, ‘is such a feeble excuse for so many things.’ Bedford, always inclined to look down her nose at ...”

“... as he might have warned a trespasser out of the grounds of Max Gate, and shock or embarrass by the candour of his disclosures: how extraordinary, for instance, was the decision to publish the ‘Poems of 1912-13’. The autobiography does both. It also retreats into the third person so as to present personal reminiscences in the guise of an ...”

“... from the ‘Ithaca’ section of Ulysses, the quintessence of home seen from abroad. Home can be a bit smug, though; and sometimes constricting. The poetic celebrants of home at the moment tend not to be women. But if it was once fashionable to see home as a ‘provincial’ bore, there have been poets around for some ...”

“... One of the key aspects of the Dylan myth during those roller-coaster years was that he wouldn’t be around much longer. He was popping quantities of pills; he hardly ever slept; he seemed to provoke showdowns with any authority he could find. ‘He was Christ revisited,’ remarked an Australian actress he briefly took up with. On occasion Dylan himself ...”

“... and asked us to go along with his interpretation. How could one not assent to so gentle a request by a speaker whose self-deprecating modesty had already won that part of the audience which had not come starry-eyed to the famous presence.He went on to one of the main texts, Marcel Mauss’s famous, brief Essai sur le don (The Gift). Derrida said the gifts ...”

“... have thrown away the wurrld ye knew ... And if ye try tae find yer way back it’ll be too late, because yew’ll ’ave changed as well – an’ there’ll be nowhere tae go back tae.’ The prediction was true and, because he knew it, Glasser accepted the scholarship, for what was there in that ...”

“... Not to know Goethe,’ A.W. Schlegel wrote poetically, ‘is to be a Goth.’ Nicholas Boyle begins the preface to Volume One of his biography of the great man by stating, altogether correctly alas, that more must be known, ‘or at any rate there must be more to know’, about him than about almost any other human being ...”

“... of Johannas’. It gave me a shock to realise that the song ‘Visions of Johanna’, by Bob Dylan, at which Salaman nods just this once, was at the same moment playing quietly on my stereo, which it does perhaps once a year. I didn’t bother to try to compute the odds against this happening, and left it as a sharp earful of what Paul Auster ...”

“... Only one of these five memoirs can be fairly called secular – quite unconcerned with the consolations of religion, untroubled by the complications. This is From Early Life by the oldest of the five authors, the novelist and scientist ‘William Cooper’: he was born in 1910 and brought up (as Harry Hoff) in the town of Crewe in Cheshire ...”

“... overlaying a diet-starved body, and the same clawed, no longer young hands about which nothing can be done whatsoever. Here, however, she is able to hide them behind the thousands of document files that surround her, a solid wall of research material on which someone has plopped a clearly reluctant cat. As those who have ploughed through its five-hundred-plus ...”

“... After all, the world has seen such things before; remember Robert Frost’s ‘I never dared be radical when young/For fear it would make me conservative when old.’ In fact, however, it is nothing of the sort. Norris is a passionately engaged radical critic of the Anglo-American Establishment. It is precisely because he is not content to fool ...”

“... thing about poor James Boswell, another great vita nuova man, ever inclined to exhort himself: ‘Be Samuel Johnson! Be the rock of Gibraltar!’) All the same, despite Svevo’s rule, there have been a few people – Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and D.H. Lawrence come to mind – who not only went on expecting to ...”

“... wonderfully playful and intelligent book: rather, the most instructive. Hawthorn is intrigued by the philosophical standing of counter-factuals – hypothetical ‘other worlds’ – and their usefulness for historians and social scientists. Some historians resist the legitimacy of invoking counter-factual stories. They stringently insist that we can ...”

“... unauthorised life of the aged but very much alive J.D. Salinger and was comprehensively outfoxed by the second most reclusive man in American letters. Hamilton wrote up his experience as a rueful memoir, In Search of J.D. Salinger. Keepers of the Flame is a further cogitation on the woes of biography, this time in a more objectively historical ...”