“... myself,’ she wrote in one of the essays in Slouching towards Bethlehem. Her subject was Comrade Michael Laski, who ran a splinter group of Stalinists in Los Angeles, where Didion interviewed him in 1967. He was threatened from every direction. Dealing with dread, Didion believed, invited risky measures of self-protection like alcohol, heroin, sex and ...”

“... to sober eyes. But there would be a real liberation in it too. If we wanted to refer to Cole Porter or Philip Marlowe or Lassie, we could do it without being suspected of trying for the popular touch; if we came across Thomas Aquinas, we wouldn’t have to pretend we found the thought in an old cookbook. This may sound utopian (or nightmarish: chacun son ...”

“... on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is English. And yet Williams, born in Windsor during World War Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a lifelong London ...”

“... All is not lost, though. What these writers have in common – Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Nadine Gordimer and Anne Sexton, who appear in the volume alongside the writers already mentioned – is that they are not men, which is not as tautological a proposition as it looks. Being ...”

“... unofficial covert agents, her use of which during the miners’ strike is now widely known. So is Michael Heseltine’s shameless abuse of his secret powers over the Belgrano affair and against CND. In his case, the whistleblowers, Clive Ponting and Cathy Massiter, can be seen as representing the older, honourable order, protesting against ...”

“... the identity a movement between two legacies and two cultures, and which makes the intellectual a porter striving to link one shore to another.’ When Kilito appeared at the London Review Bookshop during the World Literature Festival last year, he talked about this figure of the porter. He evoked the colporteur, the hawker ...”

“... sixty-four miles an hour. The Ducati 916 is a nightingale. It sings to me more sweetly than Cole Porter. Slender as a girl, aerodynamically clean. Sudden as a shark. Seidel’s first book, Final Solutions, caused a minor scandal when it was chosen to receive a small award from the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association in 1962. The national ...”

“... just how far men and women responded to these promptings and why. This is the main drawback in Michael Dobson’s clever, lucid and scrupulously-researched book about the making of Shakespeare’s national reputation. Part of the current fashion for problematising the literary canon, it argues that there were three main reasons for the rise of Bardolatry ...”

“... reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German ...”

“... questions of international affairs, and in matters of Church politics, admirably discussed by A.N. Porter and E.D. Steele. Other essays give specialist accounts of the details of Salisbury’s ministries. The consistency of the life and thought, framed around the central idea of liberalism as a kind of self-deceiving chic, comes through in all of ...”

“... with its alternately haunting and embarrassing photomontages and a fine introduction by Peter Porter, is a perfect invitation to rereading. There are many people who are sure the Quartet is a masterpiece of some sort, however patchy; and there are people who are sure it’s not a masterpiece because they find it unreadable. I have, at different ...”

“... is hell, or whether there is any difference. The set-up is perfectly portrayed in the movie by the porter who provides the information about Lime’s supposed death. ‘Killed at once,’ he says of the street accident. ‘Immediately. Already in hell,’ pointing upwards. ‘Or in heaven,’ pointing down. This ‘mistake’ was corrected in the German dubbed ...”

“... an obsessive labour, a way of life’. Her artless title is taken from a letter Helen Lowe-Porter wrote to Thomas Mann after she became his English translator. She was, she said later, an ‘unknown instrument … which … must … serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the marketplace until times ...”

“... 1925, Kurt Schwitters was met first with gales of laughter and then with tears of admiration. Bern Porter, a physicist turned outsider artist, spent the war helping to build the atomic bomb, before turning his back on his career and devoting the rest of his often isolated existence to creating what he called ‘founds’. He rearranged news clippings, magazine ...”

“... apart what the spooked, obsessive mind has put together? In All Souls Marías evokes an Oxford porter who has come adrift in time: Will literally did not know what day it was and spent each morning in a different year, travelling backwards and forwards in time according to his desires or, more likely, quite independently of any conscious desire on his ...”