“... but unreachable world beyond mess and ‘undeftness’: His fees are large, his cares are light, His analytic eyes are bright, He glows with pride as well he might. The analyst is always right. Although several of Tessimond’s poems (nine of them, to be precise) begin ‘I am’, his work is rarely directly autobiographical. The ‘I am’ poems ...”

“... Newton Minow and Craig LaMay’s book is not the first account of the history of the debates (Alan Schroeder’s Presidential Debates: Forty Years of High-Risk TV, first published in 2001, has just been updated and reissued). But Minow, as former head of the Federal Communications Commission and a founder member of the Commission on Presidential ...”

“... building, with a wealth of fine wood and stone carving, stained glass and wooden panelling, light fittings and door furniture. But the beauty had become obscured by the clutter inevitable in a building which housed seven busy crown courts, with their associated jury rooms, cells and essential offices. Some law lords had unhappy memories of their ...”

“... he could no longer work upon a fiction supposed to represent contemporary or recent life’. Alan Hollinghurst, in his acute introduction to this new edition, says the same thing. James thought he could, however, take up – these are Lubbock’s words again – ‘a story of remote and phantasmal life’. This was The Sense of the Past, James’s other ...”

“... them to be seen as a unit. Green’s conviction that ‘the Oedipodeia rises gradually towards the light; the Oresteia is imbued with the power of darkness’ is a gross simplification of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonnus, and simply inaccurate as a description of the end of the Eumenides. Here again, Green has been led astray by his obsession with ‘mirror ...”

“... those of a puffed-up schoolboy prize-winner. The war, however, shows him in a steadily worse light. During his snatches of leave he torments both his fiancée and his mother by his aloofness: he browbeats shop assistants by flaunting his service at the Front: his emotional repertoire consists of being glacial, or being condescending. He sits down to read ...”

“... Annie Dillard (1945-) and Ann Beattie (1947-). Heavy in the hand, the Companion makes for pretty light reading: Joan Didion is helpfully described as the author of ‘nonfictional works on contemporary life’; the ‘Beat movement’ as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom ...”

“... ennobled. While Nantwich was incarcerated, his Sudanese servant of 28 years’ standing, ‘the light of my life’, was killed in ‘an act of racial hatred and ignorance’. It isn’t quite clear how far the events of The Swimming-Pool Library lead Will to realise the limitations of his own behaviour and world-view. For the reader, those limitations ...”

“... characterise nobody but Clive James. It would matter less if he were less ignorant. He describes Alan Wearne’s verse novel The Nightmarkets as ‘so solidly or anyway heavily involved in the tradition of Pound, Williams, Zukofsky and the yellow pages of the telephone directory’. Here, in neat reversal, only the joke is right. Wearne does have a telephone ...”

“... it has proved to be so in the case of Saussure. Kirsch, however, has one very dependable witness, Alan Ansen, who was soon to become the poet’s secretary. Ansen was an exceptionally alert, well-read note-taker, but he missed a few of the lectures, and for them the editor has to turn to the much less reliable Howard Griffin (who also, in his turn, became ...”

“... any partner to them. Quotations from Lawrence, Joyce, the pseudonymous Laurence St Clair, Alan Hollinghurst and others, and Nussbaum’s extended commentary on them, provide ample opportunity (not taken advantage of) to have index entries for ‘cocks, soaping of in showers’, ‘erection, elephantine’, ‘genital organs, the calling by proper ...”

“... all of nature was a vast system of energy flows, an image made increasingly familiar by the new light and power systems of 1900, with energy ultimately to be identified with the favoured ghost of idealist philosophy, Spirit itself. Boltzmann found himself an increasingly lonely voice, battling repeatedly against the easy charms of energetics in the name of ...”

“... of curates and Edwardian ladies; prisoners of conscience; Anaïs Nin; Richard Crossman; Tony Benn; Alan Bennett. But on the whole, no. And yet we can’t stop ourselves. These days, if you’re a young writer and you don’t do your own weblog you’re something of an exception, and even for the amateur, the ‘journaler’, there’s now a whole industry ...”

“... comprehensive study rather poses the question of whether there is anything left to say. ‘Alan Taylor has been the subject of two good biographies,’ Chris Wrigley writes in his preface. ‘Perhaps, in the centenary year of his birth, there is room for a third.’ Perhaps. But whatever commemorations and retrospectives 2006 brought, the rediscovery ...”

“... of prices, index levels and interest rates running across the top. ‘Diffuse, bright, fluorescent light comes from the fixtures four stories above . . . There are no internal walls to break up the space.’ The stepped amphitheatres – the pits in which trading traditionally takes place – are the floor’s dominant feature. In November 1999, when I ...”