“... Fame came early to George Barker, but not so early as to take him by surprise. He designed his own ‘crypto-Renaissance catafalque’ at the age of 13, just to be on the safe side, and a year later was writing in these sophisticated terms of his own literary strengths and weaknesses: I am certain that my mind is made if anything for self-contained imaginative work: critical activity of any kind is alien to me, alien and dissonant ...”

“... hunting and gathering of what is already there. When he offers this report to the Governor, Sir George Bowen, the latter’s incomprehension is meant, it seems, to illustrate another aspect of the settler failure to come to terms with the true inner reality of Australia. The exact nature of the potential ‘native’ vegetable-and meat-supply is not spelled ...”

“... like that of a very clever student who had been nourished on a forced diet of John Cleveland, George Barker (The Dead Seagull) and Craig Raine, and who had once heard the plot of a novel by Iris Murdoch. The novel’s characters were indeed Romantic, if by that one means fabulous, fanciful, whimsical, high-flown, etc, as under Roget 515: Lucas Salik, Anne ...”

“... added many details of considerable interest, leading to a reassessment of the men involved. Though George Buchanan, the British ambassador at Petrograd, refused to intervene directly between Kerensky and Kornilov, local British military officers moved into the diplomatic void: Commander Locker-Lampson (the author has the details from the Commander’s ...”

“... Michael Moorcock’s novel honours the loonies of London. It seems there are more of them every year, especially since – by one of the more perverse acts of enlightenment – the asylums were emptied in the Seventies. One sees the London mad everywhere in the streets and parks: ranters, mutterers, arm-wavers. The quieter cases are charitably allowed into the public bars of seedy pubs; I once saw one huddled over his light ale with an antique mahogany-cased ECT apparatus perched beside him ...”

“... with the DNB’, ‘Dissenters and “Antiquity” ’ and ‘Disaffection of the Dissenters under George III’. The book adds up to the biography of a lost strain of English thought, lost not because it has been ignored but because it has been flattened, because we have learned to treat Dissent as if we knew what it was – either because we celebrate it as ...”

“... stagnated. There had been a time when it was a party of ideas and ideals – owing more to Henry George than to Marx – but its leaders had long since ceased to believe in either the practicality or the desirability of socialism, and, depressed by the ease with which Menzies won successive elections, did not bother to search for anything to put in its ...”

“... an auction of rare books from the library of his early mentor and subsequent longtime antagonist George Steevens, against whom he was still planning a full-scale polemic, even though Steevens had by then been dead for two years. On the death of his fellow editor Isaac Reed five years later he solemnly declared: ‘I am the last of the Shakspearians.’ There ...”

“... politicised his favourite mode with the onset of the Civil War – attacking his former friend George Wither for joining the Parliamentarians, for example, with the couplet ‘For Nonsence is Rebellion, and thy writing/Is nothing but Rebellious Warres inciting’ – Malcolm is so vehemently opposed to the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, for whom nonsense ...”

“... of them. What had happened? In the second volume of his biography of Proust, published in 1965, George Painter referred to ‘fragments of a lost novel’. In his 1996 biography Jean-Yves Tadié spoke of ‘75 pages currently missing’. The manuscripts were not in the collection of papers that went to the Bibliothèque nationale in 1962, or indeed anywhere ...”

“... was voted in by a majority of fearful people. The guerrilla are Uribe’s best ally, after George W. Bush, since they provide him with the ‘terrorists’ he needs, so that, like an aesthetic surgeon, he can nip and tuck his way to a nation with the perfect body. It was bad enough granting these ogres virtual amnesty. (The latest bulletin, dated 4 ...”

“... limits on carbon dioxide emissions, but their efforts were stymied by the delegation from the US. George W. Bush and his advisers are so deeply embedded in the oil, gas and coal industries that even the most rigorous scientific analysis cannot shake their commitment to fossil fuels, or make them acknowledge that burning these fuels has serious environmental ...”

“... very funny. ‘Mr Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who has never written any poetry.’ George Moore ‘is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty’. Wells ‘is the only one of his many brilliant contemporaries who has not stopped growing. One can lie awake at night and hear him grow.’ As for arguing, Chesterton and Shaw quarrelled publicly ...”

“... for it. I’m thinking especially of the priest Carel Fisher in The Time of the Angels (1966), George McCaffrey, the title character in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), and almost all the bewitched figures in The Flight from the Enchanter (1956). I imagine Murdoch would not want us to linger too long on the low-key allusion to a novel by Sartre in the ...”

“... In a speech given early last month, Michael Howard shared his thoughts on education with the Welsh Conservative Party Conference in Cardiff. He was mainly concerned with the problem of discipline. ‘Guess which class children are most likely to misbehave in?’ The answer turned out to be Citizenship. And which subject would best teach children ‘respect for authority and the importance of discipline in school’? History ...”