“... another role, as he cheerfully says, is ‘self-glorifying pantaloon’: ‘At the same table as David Hockney, Philip Roth, Harold Pinter and Sir Isaiah Berlin, it was flattering to be treated like one of the boys.’ We sometimes meet the man who’s concerned to share unflattering truths about himself – admissions, mostly, of getting over-accustomed to ...”

“... well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies – managed to stir him. The ‘tone of mandarin ...”

“... his presciently titled book (Bush had not yet loosed his thunderbolt when the MS was completed), David Victor of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, calls it ‘the Kyoto fantasyland’, and in retrospect there was never a chance of a workable agreement. But the Kyoto delegates believed they had two precedents to hearten them. In 1985 Joe ...”

“... else in the 19th century before there was any genetics to get right – the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson will have none of that: ‘The man was always right.’ Uniquely among the sciences, evolutionary biology comes with a patronymic, and so another oddity is why – if we take some of the wilder rhetorical flourishes literally – evolutionary theory is ...”

“... Alex Salmond’s predecessor as leader of the Scottish National Party, the social democrat Gordon Wilson, happened to be our local MP in East Dundee. The gap between him and radical socialists like George Galloway, then cutting his teeth in the bear pit of the Dundee Labour Party, was great, but seemed neither so great nor so significant as the gap between ...”

“... Both had married young to older intellectual powerhouse grumps – McCarthy to Edmund Wilson, who locked her in a room to force her to write, Sontag to Philip Rieff, the sociologist she met as a student at 17 and with whom she later co-authored Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – and Sontag took over McCarthy’s old lemonade stand as Partisan ...”

“... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...”

“... Oxford Books have been anything from six hundred pages to a thousand; Davie’s predecessor David Cecil’s Christian Verse was six hundred, while Davie runs to not more than half that. Where Cecil’s 1940 volume gave 40 pages to Browning and 14 to Coventry Patmore, in Davie both poets have sunk without trace. But such disappearances are only ...”

“... by Candace McMahon, Bishop wrote, in a foreword; ‘Upon being “bibliographed”, as Edmund Wilson put it, I find I am suffering from “mixty motions”, as a student’s paper put that.’ No one can doubt how many ‘mixty motions’ Millier’s biography, well-documented and admiring though it is, would have aroused in its fastidious and shy ...”

“... happened and always is’. That is why the dogs never cease to tear Actaeon. I last saw him in David Lodge’s Nice Work. I have suggested a certain equivalence of myth and psychology. This may mean that they are in a way rivals. In Euripides’ Hippolytus one can sense that psychology is preparing to take over from myth. The story itself is firmly ...”

“... aware of the difference between a ‘life of purity’, such as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted ...”

“... though it had been devised by a Germany spy while his parachute was coming down to land. Not even David Puttnam could ask for anything more. In this ‘unauthorised biography’ – ‘unauthorised’ in the sense that Archer first agreed to see the author and then thought better of it – Jonathan Mantle sets out to scrutinise Archer’s career. Together ...”

“... is propelled our way by a back-coverful of pre-publication puff: ‘really marvellous’ (Colin Wilson), ‘wickedly funny’ (A.S. Byatt), ‘very nourishing entertainment’ (Dame Rebecca West). The manuscript’s progress through the hands of less enthusiastic publishers has been recorded in various gossip columns. Anne Smith, editor of the Literary ...”

“... craft to folk culture, Catholic to Protestant everyday life. Heaney met the singer and filmmaker David Hammond in the ‘pre-Troubles, upbeat folk scene Belfast of the mid-1960s’; through him, and after the move to Dublin, he ‘got to know a lot of people, north and south, who were involved with traditional music’, among them Garech Browne of Claddagh ...”

“... we arrived at the studio until the moment we left. She didn’t use a tape recorder. (Edmund Wilson said she was ‘the girl with a tape recorder in her head’.) We watched the live recording from Lorne Michaels’s office, and she went in and out of people’s dressing rooms and availed herself of the catering, but there were no interviews, and she ...”