“... leaves Trinity College Dublin and moves to England in the 1680s as private secretary – or, as Joyce put it, ‘privysuckatary’ – to the retired diplomat and belletrist Sir William Temple. Swift may even have been an illegitimate half-brother of Temple, Damrosch suggests (one might say speculates). But it’s tempting to see him more as the hapless ...”

“... political philosophy, the history of early modern philosophy, and the aesthetics of Wagner and Joyce – and wants to do justice to the texture of our moral lives. His goal is to provide a meta-ethics – an account of the nature of ethical truth – that respects the demands of both Naturalism and humanism. This isn’t an easy thing to do. Most attempts ...”

“... he learned painting from a certain ‘Jean-Babeuf Audubon’, presumably a near relative of John James Audubon. On returning to England, he ‘lived the life of a rat’ for twenty years; he was eventually arrested in Bristol, accused of forgery and transported to Van Diemen’s Land. After causing maximum offence with a series of satirical paintings ...”

“... organ and rhetorical technique for each of Ulysses’s eighteen episodes, predetermining the way Joyce would approach the narrative. You can sense Queneau’s excitement at seeing this type of organisation. Just as he mocked the Surrealists as clueless butterfly-catchers, so he despaired of the free-form novel: ‘Anyone can drive an indeterminate number of ...”

“... code. This allegiance also cut them off from the giants of British Modernism – Yeats, Lawrence, Joyce, Pound, Eliot – all of whom chose to distance themselves from the war effort. One of Lehmann’s major themes is this profound isolation of the war poets from the cultural and political life of the home country. Though the guns of Flanders could regularly ...”

“... When he refers to Heidegger, he doesn’t mean the philosopher but the operatic impresario John James Heidegger (c.1665-1749). In Literature and Popular Culture in 18th-Century England, as in his Grub Street (1972) and its abridged version Hacks and Dunces (1980), he proposes to describe ‘how things were’ or how they seemed to be to the people who lived ...”

“... was a new dichotomy, between the ‘tradesmen’ in Gissing’s novel and ‘artists’ like Henry James and some of the characters in the series of short stories he wrote to define the author’s place in a society that was cultivating the habit of regarding literature as a fine art: the writer as artist and respected public figure, not a lowly ...”

“... traffic, occasionally lost, and at the end of ‘Fastest on Earth’ she gets a parking fine in St James’s Square. Many of the pleasures are urban and precisely located in the area around Macaulay’s Bloomsbury flat off Chancery Lane, but there are rural pleasures too. In ‘Easter in the Woods’ she contemplates a finely detailed landscape as she lingers ...”

“... one reason he slotted so well into its pages. His heroes were the great humourists of the 1940s, James Thurber and S.J. Perelman, and, like them, he often wrote of beleaguered men who struggle with a world that seems to be ...”

“... something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously.In the ...”

“... this is precisely the reason they cannot be pineapples. The most they can do is create what Henry James called the ‘air of reality’ of pineapples. In this sense, all realist art is a kind of con trick – a fact that is most obvious when the artist includes details that are redundant to the narrative (the precise tint and curve of a moustache, let us ...”

“... Everett, and making a tacit contrast between his work and that of other contemporary writers, that Joyce Carol Oates tweeted about the ‘wan little husks of “autofiction” with space between paragraphs to make the book seem longer’.Oates was complaining not just about bad taste but what it serves to exclude. Everett is routinely described as underrated ...”

“... heroes – Cassady in t-shirt, Kerouac in a Stetson; the kind of image that is now surfacing, as Joyce Johnson recalls, in hip advertisements for Gap khakis (with ‘black-sweatered girlfriend’ airbrushed out). A predatory colonisation of the past. Carolyn’s own traditional artworks, chalk drawings of ballerinas, pencil sketches of Ginsberg and Cassady ...”

“... brings aspects of his work into sharper focus without unduly cleaning up its oddness and irony. James Gordon Farrell – Jim to his friends – turns out to have had more in common with J.G. Ballard than with Paul Scott, George MacDonald Fraser, M.M. Kaye and other writers of 1970s bestsellers with imperial themes. Like the empty swimming-pools and ...”