“... Can it be doubted that to write about ‘the English Spirit’ (or L’Ame Française or ‘the Spanish Soul’) is intellectually disreputable? Plainly, there are no such entities, nor does anyone at heart believe there are. The motives for invoking them are various: vote-getting is one; also the need to find something to say at a school speech-day ...”

“... Now translated in full from the French for the first time, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is a great literary, as well as a great bibliographical, curiosity. Its author, Count Jan Potocki, who was born in 1761, belonged to one of the small handful of landowning families – the Potockis, Radziwills, Branickis, Czartoryskis and Sapiehas – who for centuries ran Poland ...”

“... That the ‘Great War’ is still deeply disturbing to the imagination came home to one last year, when a First World War tank stood on display in the forecourt of the British Museum. One reacted to the sight with a shudder of horror, and also an obscure resentment – at the idea, which seemed to be implied, that we must now proudly regard this appalling object as part of our ‘heritage ...”

“... Only a few months after the first, revelatory, biography of Philip Larkin there come two new lives – whether they are ‘revelatory’ will need pondering – of Michel Foucault. It is a suggestive coincidence. The one an exemplar of humanism, the other a grand exponent of anti-humanism, they are about the best in the way of writers their two countries have lately produced, and at their death they seemed to leave as great a hole ...”

“... What strikes one about the garden at Lamb House, as redesigned by Henry James, is that it possesses all the ingredients of an old-English garden, yet the impression it makes is American. It seems on principle to want to do without mystery, even the mild mysteries beloved of English gardening-folk. In some indefinable way it is a public garden. There was, and perhaps still is, a difference between British and American attitudes towards the ‘public’, the British nursing an ambivalence towards publicity that Americans, with their Augustan inheritance, find perverse ...”

“... Yeats’s notion of the anti-self or Mask, his theory that creativity is a matter of constructing a dream-identity antithetical to the natural self and the natural world, seems to me very profound and helpful – in fact, just true. ‘A writer must die every day he lives, be reborn, as it is said in the Burial Service, an incorruptible self, that self opposite of all that he has named “himself” ...”

“... We owe a large debt to the famous chapter on Robinson Crusoe in Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. Watt really made us use our wits about that novel and forced us to relate it to our most serious interests. Reread after twenty years, moreover, the chapter still has all of its intellectual impact and verve. The trouble is, I now find myself wanting to quarrel with almost every sentence in it ...”

“... One jibs nowadays, perhaps as a result of reading Foucault, at the once-cherished notion of an ‘age’ – such an ‘age’ as one might be tempted to paint a ‘portrait’ of. For those brought up on ages, Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses was a shock, locating as it did Colbert and Cantillon, the Port-Royal Logique and the Encyclopédie, within one and the same episteme ...”

“... Frank Kermode having now become ‘Sir Frank’, it seems a good moment to take a look back over his remarkable career: though by no means because that career is at an end, for he is producing at such a rate just now that it is quite a job to keep up with him. Very broadly, one can think of his career so far as falling into four stages. The first stage, from Romantic Image (1957) to Puzzles and Epiphanies (1962), was very much imbued with Symboliste theory, and Kermode was ready to go along with the notions of the autonomy and organic unity of the work of art (and with the word ‘art’ itself) and with the identity of form and meaning ...”

“... There are several different things one can be aiming at in a verse translation, leaving aside the genre known as ‘Imitation’, in which poets like Samuel Johnson, Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell have done such marvellous things. A verse translation may aim to be an independent modern work in its own right. Or, I ought rather to say, this is what some famous and admired translations have in fact been ...”

“... that he poses are enough to frighten off the most intrepid biographer and one can only admire P.N. Furbank, not merely for tackling the job at all, but for doing it so well. Diderot’s long life, from 1713 to 1784, almost spanned the whole period between Louis XIV and the French Revolution. He was a compulsive writer and his output was enormous. Its range was ...”

“... from a hundred items to something like six times that figure in the last two centuries. P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens take us through the stages of this galloping hypertrophy more in sorrow than in anger, but they leave no doubt that the guilty men who have swollen the corpus with their rash attributions have been abetted by the passivity of other Defoe ...”

“... view (The Making of the English Working Class), a facetious one – ‘unholy pleasure’, as P.N. Furbank reprovingly calls it – or attempt a pose of scientific detachment. Each has its limitations. Furbank tries to be himself, as it were, but he cannot refrain from taking the proper line by pointing out that ‘the ...”

“... effects, as of charm or wit or niceness, were easier to achieve than sincerity. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank have found 15,000 letters to choose from. I assume they have chosen what they consider the most interesting ones, the letters which most reveal Forster’s personality, the quality of his friendships, the conditions of his work. In the years covered by ...”

“... men would be cowards if they durst.’ However, you wouldn’t want to read much more of what P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens call ‘the most complete statement of Defoe’s political and ethical philosophy’. You might guess this from Defoe’s own preface: ‘As to the Poetical Part of it, where the Argument of it lies strong, I have been very careless of ...”