“... toll from Covid last year. It’s about twenty times as many as the current annual deaths from war, murder and terrorism combined. Put another way, air pollution kills twenty thousand on an average day, more than have died in the aftermath of all the meltdowns in the history of nuclear power: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima and all the others put ...”

“... collateral victims of the Olympic gaze: heavy-pelted German Shepherds, down on their luck, war veterans with a folk memory of clover-munching sheep; fluffed-out, pinkish creatures on very thin legs, like wealthy matrons from the Kolonaki district caught in the rain without their dark glasses. Feral packs once roamed the city, it’s what dogs ...”

“... in 1984, two months after Able Archer, the Nato exercise that brought the world closer to war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Manser’s flight to the forest had a good deal of fantasy about it, but there was nothing bogus or half-hearted about his efforts to immerse himself in the life of the Penan. They were the human equivalent of ...”

“... player. Christopher Ricks describes the technique as conveying ‘by sabotage that there was a war on’, and he takes this passage as a prime example: Eliot, he says, is to be seen ‘adopting Oliver Goldsmith’s line … and then undoing it by adding the innocuous little word “and”’. The little word undoes the old rhythm of the original and ...”

“... kinds of complication (seating mourners correctly at a funeral, insulting someone with a second-class stamp, genealogy), my mother has an aversion to others (washing up, replacing a battery, packing or unpacking a suitcase), but I suspect her comment was directed at a larger possibility of difficulty than the merely practical. I didn’t ask because I ...”

“... having been ‘destined for the leadership of the Party’ misunderstands the very nature of post-war Conservatism. To emphasise loyalty as one of Mrs Thatcher’s most conspicuous characteristics overlooks a record extending far beyond the said Einstein. ‘If you’ve been in the Thatcher Court, you’ll always be close to her’ is an anonymous quote ...”

“... friends and critics it seemed to sum up every tawdry thing they suspected and despised about post-war America: vulgarity, self-promotion and hustle; the giant-finned American cars in Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’, that slide by on grease with ‘a savage servility’; the slippery, oily and false. Americanism, slickness and writing come together ...”

“... course, Glasgow has always had its writers. Torrington’s late Sixties hero is himself a working-class would-be novelist, ‘forever craving an ink-fix’ and given to bemoaning the blizzard of rival authors sweeping through the city: ‘To get into the boozers you’d to plod through drifts of Hemingways and Mailers. Kerouacs by the dozen could be found ...”

“... of the great themes of this century’s verse, then Williams, though a kind of retreating upper-class Imperial Englishness is implicit in many poems, belongs to the post-Lowell part of the century, in which ‘home’ means not so much territory as people. In Dock Leaves, his finest collection to date, Williams, celebrated memorialist of his father, writes ...”

“... Britain is very different from that of Attlee’s Britain. The old male wage-earning working class has half-disappeared, as a re suit not only of the decay of manufacturing industry but also of the huge decline – which has gone even further elsewhere – of the male proportion of the workforce. At the same time there has been a steady rise in ...”

“... to make her living by her pen. For Greer, Behn is an ambiguous female, who must have been lower class if she grovelled so flatteringly to the low-born Nell Gwynn. It has been suggested elsewhere that Aphra Behn had some connections with Kentish gentry, but Greer will have none of it: ‘It is more likely that Mrs Behn’s was a milieu without social ...”

“... in the Studies in Hysteria might well have been in institutions if they had not been middle-class Viennese.) Writers such as Maupassant and Poe were exploring the byways of the mind, and towards the end of the century titles like Multiplex Personality, Das Doppel-Ich and Les Maladies de la personnalité abounded. Connections between the unconscious or ...”

“... through the eyes of a spirited, imaginative, polio-stricken girl, the cosseted child of a middle-class Parsee family. Lenny has an ayah, a nanny, of whom she is inordinately fond, and Ayah has followers, attracted by her well-rounded Punjabi personality. Among these admirers she holds court, in the local park as well as in the kitchen and garden of her ...”

“... remain unknown, as playwrights, north of the Pyrenees; and no Spanish dramatist since the Civil War has produced anything even remotely comparable to El público (‘The Audience’ or ‘The Public’), Once Five Years Pass, Don Perlimplín, Doña Rosita the Spinster, Blood Wedding, Yerma or The House of Bernarda Alba. Lorca was also a great poet, perhaps ...”

“... some it has been cast as a comedy of manners, a charming period divertissement on life in middle-class America during the Vietnam era. Others have seen it as a diseased farce, a bilious Thersitical outpouring, soured by a deep-seated misogyny. I think it is both these things and more, all at the same time, which is why reading it is such a queasy ...”