“... Barnes (b. 1946), although nothing from Shuttlecock, by Graham Swift (b. 1949), which gives the best description I know of the territory, real and psychological, in which his generation grew up in Britain: What attracted me then about Camber was less its whispering billows of sand and wheeling black-headed gulls ... [than] the relics of the war that still ...”

“... Portraits afford many opportunities for the exercise of this kind of discretion, since they are best regarded not as simple reproductions of objects in the painter’s visual field but rather as presentations (as well as representations) of the sitter to the spectator: in other words, as documents of what the late Erving Goffman used to call ‘impression ...”

“... century there were Caravat and Shanavest pubs, wren-boys, mummers’ teams, songs and dance tunes. Nicholas Hanley, chief of the Caravats, was a flamboyant dandy who strutted about with a blunderbuss and brace of pistols, returned to his plundered victims any items he thought it beneath his dignity to pocket, and ostentatiously threw his elegant cravat to the ...”

“... state of inner juices, though that is the sedimented meaning.The brain as computer: is this the best we can do? The computer is so obvious; we spend so much of our days touching it, melding our minds with it. The premodern imagination was more ambitious. From ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, men and women looked into the fire or up at the sky to ...”

“... are one reason (Blade Runner is another) why Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? remains Dick’s best-known book, despite the baldness of its prose: ‘“Do you think androids have souls?” Rick interrupted.’ Do Androids? is also a book about authentic feeling, about how and when we can trust our emotions. Deckard and his wife own a ‘mood ...”

“... to the point of eccentricity’. Certainly that is the reputation which has stuck to his best-known predecessor, Henry George. In his 1879 bestseller, Progress and Poverty, George set out the same thumping principle which inspires Linklater: ‘The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political ...”

“... cultures enthusiastically worshipped Nikulapaz, who is a version of that jolly Christmas saint St Nicholas, while the evil entity in the Mordvin pantheon is Shyaytan, not a million miles from that evil construct of Judaism and Christianity, Satan. The word ‘pagan’ keeps creeping back – not least in the subtitle of Young’s book – because of its ...”

“... lately comes up frozen quite stiff.This love of chaos, motion, process, which is the energy of his best poems, and often makes them resemble action paintings, is brought to a halt by the strong stresses on the last three words so that the stretched perception is completed. And there is a heightened exultation in chaos in a much later letter (23 October ...”

“... the crushed ambitions.’ In September 1849, after breaking with Colet, Flaubert invited his two best friends, Du Camp and the playwright Louis Bouilhet, to Croisset for a reading of his finished work; it took 32 hours over four days. The listeners had promised they would not comment until the end, and when it finally came they told him that St Anthony was a ...”

“... of literary names rarely turn out to exemplify general tendencies. For some realist writers the best names are invisible. Henry James was a great fretter over names, as you might expect from someone who had the same names as his father, both of which could be interchangeably a surname or a first name. He wanted his characters’ names to have a tang of ...”

“... so quiet.’ ‘Just hanging on,’ Armstrong replied, ‘and punching.’ It was Collins who best described the three men: they were ‘amiable strangers’, never close. Aldrin was known as Dr Rendezvous for his habit at parties of droning on about the technical detail of the lunar module, named Eagle, for the Apollo 11 mission, and the way it would ...”

“... writers. Fortunately, he discovered in himself another talent, and under the pen-name of ‘Nicholas Blake’ published a series of commercially successful detective stories, the classic genteel-class literary genre of the interwar period. At this point, Day-Lewis seemed even more of a whole-hogger for ‘the Revolution’ than Auden and Spender ...”

“... he died at forty, probably of tuberculosis, he left his manuscript of English poems to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, leader of the spiritual community at Little Gidding, to publish or destroy as he saw fit. Ferrar found it worth publishing. What was George Herbert like? ‘Saintly’ is a misleading adjective: saints often have difficult personalities. The ...”

“... life, he had to realise that his vocation was not a true one, and, again taking the second best, he married – preferring wedded restraint to religious celibacy. He became the model paterfamilias, ruling his family gently but firmly, teaching them all to love virtue and learning. Everybody’s advocate and a model judge, he is a splendid public ...”

“... he was right.’ The sheep – the farmyard’s lumpen-proletariat – have failed. The best hope lies in the foxes: furry class warriors, voteless and mute. Mullin is awed by power as well as alienated. The diaries display what might be called the Yahweh syndrome, the self-imposed embargo on calling the supreme being by name. In Alan Clark’s ...”