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“... 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 Review’s theatre reviewer. Lines of succession make for neat ...”

“... This unanimity should therefore be worth looking into, especially in the case of work like Philip Larkin’s, always more reserved and elusive than it seems. I want to consider his writing in juxtaposition with that of Kingsley Amis, close friend of the poet’s for over forty years; and to begin with Amis’s recent Booker Prize-winning novel. The ...”

“... numbers; it should also contain no titles, which leads one to wonder how Princess Tiaamii passed. French names were officially liberated in 1993, and in Spain, in 2007, the principle, at least, of freedom in naming was recognised; a century and a half after the rise of the Nellies in America and Britain, a Spanish couple can now register a child under the ...”

“... I was approaching 13: the huge anti-Suez demonstration in 1956, when the targets were British and French imperialism, and Israel of course – and it was amazing. The university students came to our school to have it closed so we could join the demo, and the principal, Brother Henderson, closed it for the day. Because there was no martial law, no military ...”

“... country, pines for the specious distractions of the big smoke: ‘The whole point,’ the scholar Philip Drew maintained, ‘is that the contrasts drawn by the speaker, with his exaggerated ideas of savoir vivre, are all reversed by the reader.’ But you don’t need independently to know about Browning’s love for a bustling urban scene to realise that ...”

“... had irresistible appeal. Linking the Biblical story of the baptism of the Ethiopian by Philip the Evangelist (Acts 8.27-40) with such texts as ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God’ (Psalm 68.31), they marked out an alternative tradition to the one which condemned them, as sons of Ham, to be perpetual ‘servants of ...”

“... nearly scuppered the First Crusade and did scupper all the rest. Visiting kings, like Richard and Philip II of France, bickered about precedence; the Christian nobility in Palestine fought each other for the increasingly enfeebled crown of Jerusalem; above all, Crusaders fresh from Europe, with all the bigoted ignorance of their modern successors and with ...”

“... but my love of horses is deeply rooted, and I had an exiled feeling.’ One does not recall Sir Philip Sidney saying that horsemanship and poetry were alternatives, or the Earl of Dorset complaining that he could not write verses at sea. But Sassoon has the post-romantic disease: ‘How futile my existence sounds! It can only be judged by results (literary ...”

“... every sense characters of their own have their Nabokov books: Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince or Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, though Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, which has all the right ingredients, was surely conceived mystically between the author and God, without Nabokov’s mediation. Still, Spark put her finger on the reason Nabokov’s ...”

“... a temple to a pagan god (rather than an art gallery) Little Sparta was exempt, he encountered mock French Revolutionary armed resistance. Over the years Finlay repelled not just the sheriff officer but – even after his death in 2006 – biographers too; anthologists often don’t know what to do with him either. His experiences with publishers were not ...”

“... Europe’s other most senior Catholic, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, or with Charles’s son Philip II of Spain. Pierluigi Farnese, the eldest son of one pope during this time, was widely accused of raping a 24-year-old bishop, hastening the unfortunate young man’s death (Farnese was later murdered by subordinates of Charles V), while another Holy ...”

“... life. As epigraph to that bizarre document, Mangan quoted two lines he claimed to have found in Philip Massinger, though no one else has found them there: ‘A heavy shadow lay/On that boy’s spirit: he was not of his fathers.’ Mangan was the second son of James Mangan and his wife, Catherine. His father, for a time a teacher in a hedge school, married ...”

“... Welty and Terry Southern (author of The Magic Christian and the famously dirty book Candy); or the French New Novelist Nathalie Sarraute, who singled out Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett as (after the demise of Woolf) the most original and distinctive voices in British writing. Southern managed to coax out of Green, who was notoriously inarticulate (and not just ...”

“... demons, often in obscure psychic concert with another man, dead or alive. Maxim kills Rebecca, Philip kills his cousin Rachel by an act of omission, and Julius, true to his overwrought foreign nature, wastes four women in all. These examples are taken from the novels, but the short stories, some very warped indeed, are full of them. Such murders are never ...”

“... everyone knows they don’t believe in. Never mind the few genuine Brexiteers. Amber Rudd, Philip Hammond and Theresa May – among others in government – all tried to keep the UK in the European Union. Now they are trying to take it out again, apparently on the terms that will do their country most damage. There’s a kind explanation, a ...”