“... 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 ...”

“... too damn much of everything.’ But I also found myself wondering why Ammons isn’t read more outside the US and was reminded of Donald Davie’s 1975 review of Sphere, which he began by admitting that the idea of yet another ‘major visionary poet’ was an unattractive proposition. Still, he confessed, ‘I ...”

“... poet, Duncan was accused by his friend Charles Olson – along with just about everyone else who read his work – of wanton myth-mongering, a charge against which he didn’t even try to defend himself. Olson, he wrote, suspects, and rightly, that I indulge myself in pretentious fictions. I, however … take enuf delight in the available glamour that I do ...”

“... who don’t believe in climate change because they were freezing cold this winter and trust what Donald Trump or Nigel Farage tells them on Fox News or the BBC. I mean the people who stand to gain from the Trump administration’s America First Energy Plan, which will increase US dependence on fossil fuels: more fracking, more coal-mining, more ...”

“... were later quashed, and served more than three years in prison. In 2018 Black published Donald J. Trump: A President like No Other, which argued that Trump was ‘not, in fact, a racist, sexist, warmonger, hothead, promoter of violence, or a foreign or domestic economic warrior’, but fundamentally shy and misunderstood. The following year he ...”

“... have come more frequently. Michael Schmidt, his colleague on PN Review, has promoted his work; and Donald Davie, in one of those hot flushes that make his criticism so unpredictable and exciting, has declared Sisson’s ‘The Usk’ to be ‘one of the great poems of our time’. Sisson’s critical writing is intelligent, sharp, individual and readable. He ...”

“... long provenance: the Highlands were a testbed for 18th and 19th-century agricultural Improvement (read: Clearances); St Kilda was a ‘natural experiment’ after the evacuation of its population in 1930, and so was the island of Rum, after it was sold to the Nature Conservancy Council in 1957 (it’s now owned by NatureScot). In all these cases, the language ...”

“... national character to be of a ‘heroism almost approaching the sublime’. Although the book was read (and sometimes admired) in Asia and Africa, it was impossible to square its emphatic voluntarism with the idea that global power structures trapped colonised peoples in relations of dependency. Smiles was impatient with structures. ‘It may be of ...”

“... stands) or as a star figure in the creation of ‘the city as a work of art’ (the title of Donald Olsen’s book on the subject, published in 1988). Aesthetics were not Louis-Napoleon’s strong point. In the eclectic medley of Second Empire styles, his basic preferences were Modernist; he was a glass-and-iron man, as evidenced by his enthusiasm for ...”

“... living in a world imagined by Philip K. Dick; this was easily recognisable even if you’d barely read him. To those who knew his work well, the morning-after debate consisted of whether Trump was more like Buster Friendly, the fascist demagogue television personality from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, or President Fremont from Radio Free ...”

“... It’s​ almost impossible to read any work on meritocracy without being reminded that the word was first used in mid-20th-century Britain to portray a dystopian society, a rigid caste system in which a smug elite claimed power on the basis of superior effort and ability. But it was imperial China where meritocratic ideals were first brought to life ...”