“... of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. There are virtuoso pages like 71, where Henry James and Edmund Gosse bicycle through the text (‘Those were bicycle times ... The Time Machine with its saddle was itself a transfigured bicycle. Wells’s third novel The Wheels of Chance (1896), had been all about bicyclists’). The book offers a cornucopia ...”

“... of the really rather famous book by Cawdrey published 14 years before Blount was born. Patrick Joyce conceals some valuable material on dialect behind a smokescreen of class prejudice and rather poor writing; a not untypical example: ‘around the mid-19th century when dialect emerged’. Daniel Rosenberg on Home Tooke makes interesting connections back to ...”

“... hats would find its way into Finnegans Wake, according to Thornton Wilder, a formidable scholar of Joyce. ‘This is the three lipoleum Coyne Grouching down in the living detch.’ When told of the homage in later years, Groucho was well pleased and only a little sceptical. ‘Did a New York policeman, on his way back to Ireland to see his dear old Mother ...”

“... in other writers given to works of encyclopedic dimensions, from Spenser to the Romantic poets to Joyce and his successors, it often manifests itself as a celebration of the heroics of authorship, of the effort to cope with the cultural accumulations that over the centuries have been building up within literary practice. The reader is invited, in such ...”

“... main claim to fame is that he produced the classic explanation for the origins of the Civil War. Joyce Malcolm has recently written of ‘the almost religious reliance’ placed by later historians on Baxter’s word. That word commanded attention by its balance: ‘But though it must be confessed that the public safety and liberty wrought very much with ...”

“... Hamlet marks the point of transition to the new dynamics of the reign of James. As the Prince increasingly uses the terms employed by artisans and the lower orders, he seems to commit himself to a language learned from the politically voiceless, and thus to become their mouthpiece. To the Court this signifies madness.Madness of a ...”

“... on Irish radio in 1995 and published in The Great Irish Famine: The Thomas Davis Lecture Series, James Donnelly remarked thatthroughout the rest of the Famine years, the Gregory clause or ‘Gregoryism’ became a byword for the worst miseries of the disaster – eviction, exile, disease and death. When in 1874 Canon John O’Rourke, the parish priest of ...”

“... things might be more readily and happily received by reading some other writer – Eliot, say, or Joyce – is not a question that occurs to Casillo. Yet after his own investigations the problem of Pound’s work – why he should be read at all, how his writings could be included in a school or university’s ‘humanities curriculum’ – is more starkly ...”

“... food and drink he consumed in the course of 1974. Perec had a prodigious memory – indeed, like Joyce, he saw literary composition as largely a question of memory and problem-solving, and in the epilogue to La Disparition he rubbishes the idea of inspiration. Another scheme he never realised was to describe all the rooms he had ever slept in, excluding only ...”

“... sequel’, which is not an imitation but a prolongation – like Walter Scott’s or James Fenimore Cooper’s novel cycles, or Balzac’s Human Comedy. Both types are tied to market forces. Collections like To Be Continued: An Annotated Guide to Sequels (1995) and The Whole Story: 3000 Years of Sequels and Sequences (1996) attest to the ...”

“... Hardly any good poems came out of the conflict in Vietnam and most of those were written by James Fenton, a poet alert to the eerie surrealism of war. What happens when the war is banished from the front page and into the history books? Pound said, in the ABC of Reading, that ‘literature is news that STAYS news.’ Eliot, on the other hand, was less ...”

“... it, equip us to make a rational judgment. We may, for instance, conclude that the description of James Wait’s death in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is verbally so close to the death scene of Forestier in Maupassant’s Bel Ami that the latter must have influenced the former; and if others agree, then something definite (and not uninteresting) has been ...”

“... was published – and having written biographies of Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Rosalind Franklin, Nora Joyce and Margaret Thatcher, she knows how to give a logic to a life. Like many of Freud’s first disciples, Jones, she suggests, was drawn to psychoanalysis because it offered him the chance to correct, as he put it in a letter to his mentor, ‘various wrong ...”

“... your thought’. She is delighted to accept. This is joltingly hard to read today – even P.D. James, no slave to political correctness, calls it ‘blatant misogyny’. It goes a long way to ruining what is otherwise a prime example of golden age detective fiction. Sayers gets into similar difficulties with the character of Harriet Vane, who is unmarried ...”

“... Daedalus or an Icarus? ‘Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.’ Like Joyce he should have said it every day, clutching his talent to guide his genius. All too often he flew too near the sun. David Minter is naturally fully aware of a division of forces in Faulkner’s make-up, an attraction towards the real, a counter-attraction ...”