“... not seriously doubt his right to be one’; and Canetti goes on to quote an anonymous diarist (it may have been the Berlin poet Oskar Loerke) who wrote ten days before the outbreak of the Second World War: ‘But everything is over. If I were really a poet, I would have to be able to prevent the war.’ Paying homage to the sense of reponsibility that makes a ...”

“... as to why Peter Sutcliffe behaved as he did, just the events, the family life, anecdotes that may or may not be pertinent, the pubs and their atmosphere. And we go back, or rather from the beginning of the book we go forward – from Sutcliffe’s grandparents on both sides. How else is he to explain, or attempt to ...”

“... reduce Abstract Ideas to that same passive participle he became Hazlitt’s opponent. This matter may seem dry: but such grammar is pertinent to David Bromwich’s observations about Hazlitt’s handling of Abstract Ideas. He recognises, for instance, that it is important that Matthew Arnold used the noun ‘disinterestedness’ where Hazlitt preferred the ...”

“... worst) plumb in the middle of whatever we understand by Anglo-American Modernism in poetry. Anyone may be excused for deciding that life is too short for coming to terms with The Cantos: but if we make that decision we thereby disqualify ourselves from having any opinion worth listening to, about the poetry in English of this century. What incessantly ...”

“... On 13 May Manchester City, the club I have supported since I was a boy in the 1970s, won the Premier League, their first championship since they won the old Football League in 1968. In those days, fans stood on old, groaning terraces; there were no sponsors’ logos to compete with the badge on the players’ shirts; and to my mind at least, the game had nothing to do with money ...”

“... If there are general principles to literary naming, and yet everybody does it differently, then it may turn out to be a practice as mysterious as language use and as idiosyncratic as aesthetic appreciation: there may well be underlying principles, but variations may be so extensive that ...”

“... for the last month. And that I have had what has happened incessantly in my mind. Perhaps we may meet some day, and be able to talk. I am afraid Tom’s terrific life takes all my energy, and I can only lie still and wait for it to end. With all my thoughts and wishes for you Vivien Shortly afterwards she writes to him again: I am beginning to ...”

“... so hard to disentangle history from blame in accounts of Northern Ireland since the late 1960s. In May 1974, in the New York Review of Books, the critic Seamus Deane lambasted Conor Cruise O’Brien, then minister for posts and telegraphs in the Irish Republic’s coalition government, for implying in a previous issue that ‘the Provisional IRA began the ...”

“... head, rather than worn in a tight knot. I have never seen him dressed like that before, though it may have nothing to do with his recent ‘accident’. ‘Shlonak, Sheikh?’ I ask how he is in Iraqi Arabic. ‘Al hamdullilah’ (‘God be praised’). ‘Ahlan wa sahlan’ (‘Welcome’). ‘And I you, Mr Rory,’ he says, in a rare phrase of English, and ...”

“... about the ways new technologies and chemicals are already affecting our brains, and what they may do in the next few years. These chapters are very, very cautious (‘we just don’t know’). Both parts pack in an amazing amount of information, gracefully told anecdotes, and a certain amount of social-democratic ‘attitude’. But there is a ...”

“... helps us to grasp his work’s ‘private grammar’, its possible ‘intended’ meanings.What may account for its wrecking tendencies is the gap between the kind of life Rochester expected to have and the role he found himself playing at court. He spent his childhood at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, where he was given a thorough Anglican education by his ...”

“... brief. ‘Here is a very concise and truthful answer: the reason I write a particular story may be because something – which I call “material”, as in “raw material” – bothers me until I “do something” about it. In these cases, “bother” is wholly positive.’ A writer as capable as Davis of conjuring a found object from the merest ...”

“... minds in their writers, as do troubled families or systems of belief: but while being so troubled may be a powerful incitement to literary production, it may equally get in the way of real achievement. Writers can find themselves facing a dilemma, a choice between fidelity to their own passionate confusions and the possibly ...”

“... might call populist in both its positive and negative senses’. The rather puzzling last phrase may be designed to cover the case of George Cannon, who in his later career became a straightforward pornographer – and understandably loses the advocacy of Dr McCalman. There were a few journalists and publishers in the 1830s and after who continued to combine ...”

“... another, languages intersect on every corner and psychotics jabber in the street. Street lighting may have been improved after the Ripper killings of 1888, but Spitalfields remains a place of unpredictable encounters – full of intriguing little surprises as one unlikely appearance gives way to the next. The story of Rodinsky’s disappearance becomes a ...”