“... of the exquisite divinatory intelligence required to make proper use of that knowledge’. Nice work if you can do it, as Cole Porter didn’t quite say. Kermode is not Housman and not a diviner. But he does devote much exquisite intelligence to matters of divination – even and especially of secular affairs. He would like to believe we could do ...”

“... Purity. Man Two is successful, manipulative, priapic, with an aridity to his heart: the rock star Richard Katz in Freedom, the ‘famous internet outlaw’ Andreas Wolf in Purity. What seemed in The Corrections like a generous sharing of perspective between characters who, being related, can’t avoid acknowledging that they see things differently – the ...”

“... pursue migrants attempting the perilous journey through the mountains. The administrative court in Nice has ruled against the prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes on at least four occasions, finding him responsible for ‘illegal practices regarding migrants’ – notably unaccompanied minors and asylum-seekers who have been denied protection and ...”

“... for a spell in London found themselves next to people who had gone to convent school and Rada, nice people but different, loosely self-conscious and super-educated and social in a way the Northerners had never seen. I met Alan Sillitoe in the 1990s, and he was still shy, still standing at the edge of the party. But it was Storey who most powerfully ...”

“... she mentioned Maureen Duffy’s Capital) whose characters used public transport – it made a nice change. Late in life, Alec makes vivid mental notes on his fellow passengers while travelling on the tube (‘Square-faced pasty white boy, with swags of beard at the corners of his jaw, like a playing-card king’s’). At the same age Jo, riding a 54 ...”

“... made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the finger-man for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making.When ...”

“... male previous tenant, a distinguished-looking chap, inspected the bottle and said it was a very nice wine but – with a propitiatory laugh – he preferred Burgundy. I said that for my part I didn’t much care for the way he was dressed. He smiled awkwardly and blushed. A certain coolness then ensued, to tell the truth, and conversation flagged. The not ...”

“... Opera became a sensitive field of ideological possibilities: the traditions associated with Richard Wagner, in particular, had to be reassessed in the withering light of Nazism, while in Italy the revival – begun under Mussolini as part of a nationalist cultural policy – of an apparently dead repertory of early 19th-century works led to a vogue for ...”

“... of Communism the emergence of Senator McCarthy; the Civil Rights movement; Vietnam; the return of Richard Nixon; Watergate – it is all there, introduced with a swift and studied casualness. ‘Meanwhile, the war in Europe ends, the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki ... ’ Meanwhile? I suppose there is a blurry sort of truthfulness in this ...”

“... to see wage rises as being in any way dependent on increased productivity; there is (nice one) the evident pride that specialist car-makers took in making their customers wait years for delivery. An attempt is made to resolve the apparent contradiction in the next chapter, on ‘The Learning Process’. Here the argument is that businessmen and ...”

“... of her native country.’ By this time she was playing Lady Anne and Desdemona to Edmund Kean’s Richard III and Othello. Star quality, however, was not at all what was looked for in those who played opposite a superstar like Kean. She was prized as ‘a decorative utility player’, and as a ‘sweet but ... somewhat passive stage personality’. It must ...”

“... downright good a story … Too oily.’ ‘I was only thinking last night,’ she wrote in 1921 to Richard Murry, ‘people have hardly begun to write yet – now I mean prose … Aren’t they still cutting up sections rather than tackling the whole of a mind? … With all that one knows how much does one not know? … The unknown is far, far greater than the ...”

“... no notion how fast it was galloping at that very moment to overtake me.’ ‘Galloping’ is a nice touch, since narrative custom mostly suggests that destiny sneaks up on us, that it can’t be seen in the offing. Jake’s ‘I had no notion’ respects this principle but the rest of the sentence ruins it, plants us firmly in narrating rather than ...”

“... self-involvement doesn’t grate. Narcissism comes in many flavours, and Ellis’s has a nice soothing vocal quality, perfect for earbud listening on long rides. No matter how mellow Ellis manages to sound, however, he retains a knack for maddening people, for saying just the right wrong thing to make his legions of detractors swirl like ...”

“... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit ...”