“... The face on the Carcanet cover is a deeply scored calligraphy of experience, framed by rock-starish lightly silvered hair and reflective shades, behind which eyes that miss nothing flick from side to side, tracking through the exploitable sets of a working life: railside Illinois, Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Black Mountain College in ...”

“... way Heller laboured to make Something Happened big. Repeating the big success was the Sisyphean rock assigned to Heller and other one-book wonders. How do you follow something that seizes the public imagination like Gone with the Wind, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Invisible Man or Heller’s own antic masterpiece about the world’s ...”

“... to expand his portfolio of North American newspapers, acting in concert with his close associate David Radler, whose sincerely expressed view was that the ideal newspaper consisted of ‘a three-man newsroom – one journalist and two advertising salesmen’. Sackings, cuts, and fines for wasting paper and pencils might not sound like a recipe for brilliant ...”

“... bogeyman years, regularly invoked by politicians of all parties as the nadir of postwar Britain. David Cameron (though it could just as easily have been Gordon Brown) read out the charge sheet at a Demos meeting in 2006: ‘economic decline . . . inflation, stagnation and rising unemployment . . . deteriorating industrial relations’. Nearly 30 million ...”

“... the point of all this sport-watching? What is it for? I even had a title, drawn from a remark David Sexton, the literary editor of the Evening Standard, once made to me. ‘I’m not interested in sport,’ he said, ‘but I often wish I were, given that the mind is always in pain.’ The mind is always in pain … Yes, given that, you can easily see why ...”

“... to ‘a crêpe flipped in the pan’, an image that shrinks and sweetens a piece of lifeless rock. Yet the stove-side manoeuvre described would be as hard to bring off in the world of the book (the off-world of the book) as a spacewalk. It’s as if basic literary mechanisms too are subject to the changed conditions of microgravity, so that the tenor and ...”

“... you are. The Little Flower, she of the astonishing self-love? Hildegard of Bingen, glowing like rock crystal, or Simone Weil, picking herself like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of ...”

“... in literary limbo. Her rediscovery came in 1977. Two influential fans, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, named her as their ‘most underrated author’ in the TLS and she was taken up in a flurry of publicity, interviewed on radio and TV. Quartet in Autumn, the novel she had on the stocks, was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker prize and new ...”

“... essays – during the period of composition the world does nothing but give you gifts.They love David Foster Wallace here, and I have read no one but him for months. His books are everywhere in tall voluble stacks – a writer is always everywhere when you are working on them. I feel partially disrobed when I see his name. At my sickest, I had begun asking ...”

“... selection of speakers, who ranged from Patrick Heron to Victor Burgin, Mary Kelly to Robyn Denny, David Hockney to Rasheed Araeen. The highlights included Lisa Tickner’s brilliant dismemberment of Reg Butler’s defence of his question: ‘Can a woman become a vital creative artist without ceasing to be a woman except for purposes of census?’ Peter ...”

“... made no sense, because only an imbalance could be redressed. I gave in for the same reason that rock splits under the impact of dripping water. So small a point ought not to matter, except that having the way you write absorbed into house style is only a step away from having the way you think absorbed into editorial policy. American critical papers, aware ...”

“... as Azéma explained to Fittko, was that for large parts of the way, it was secluded by canopies of rock. Fittko had done well to establish such a dependable lead so quickly. A few days later, Walter Benjamin arrived on her doorstep in Port Vendres. He’d obtained a visa from the US Consulate, thanks to the good offices of Max Horkheimer, and wanted her to ...”

“... an advocate, at the Oxford Union, of the birch and stocks; Chris Huhne, later energy secretary in David Cameron’s cabinet; Jeremy Hunt, the current health secretary. Johnson liked teaching and had a taste for the rough and tumble. His great day was not as a young man who worried about apartheid, or a feisty libertarian outnumbered by big French Stalinists ...”

“... on the prominence of ‘the morbid and the tragic’ in his own work, the Guyanese poet David Dabydeen once said that ‘the plantation experience had severe and traumatic psychic impacts … but overwhelmingly had to do with what is the very ground of our being, which is our body.’ This is an obvious reason slavery goes with revenge tragedy. The ...”