“... downright good a story … Too oily.’ ‘I was only thinking last night,’ she wrote in 1921 to Richard Murry, ‘people have hardly begun to write yet – now I mean prose … Aren’t they still cutting up sections rather than tackling the whole of a mind? … With all that one knows how much does one not know? … The unknown is far, far greater than the ...”

“... Jeremy Prynne what he thought of Captain Beefheart, he said he thought he sounded like Little Richard.’ Poodle Play is the Cambridge Poetry Festival on steroids. The exoskeleton recalls the papers delivered from the platform on that Saturday afternoon in King’s: selections from the Frankfurt School, carried aloft like placards in a Brecht play, moral ...”

“... and whose formative influence he sought early on to minimise. Walsh admits his dependence on Richard Taruskin’s ‘monumental’ Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, whose painstaking researches into Stravinsky’s early life and his relations with the Rimsky-Korsakov circle in St Petersburg give body to Walsh’s Stravinsky: A Creative Spring ...”

“... Her first full-length novel, written when she was sixteen, adopted an ironic style, echoing Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow, whose satirical nihilism was all the rage. Pym and Robert Liddell, a close friend from Oxford, wrote reams to each other in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s brittle manner, relishing her exposure of the tyranny of family relations; she had ...”

“... to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government. Condorcet foresaw endless social progress, an egalitarian society in which technological advance would provide for an ...”

“... he mentioned that it was produced under the sponsorship of ‘André Gide, Heinrich Mann and Aldous Huxley’. There was no mention of his father. ‘As for our father,’ he finally wrote, the Nazis, ‘still afraid of public opinion abroad’, were more ‘reluctant’ to place him on a blacklist: ‘At this point his works were not officially ...”

“... in the flats above and below don’t even know there’s been a fire. This was something else.’ Richard Welsh is a senior officer with the London Fire Brigade. His pager went off at 1.18 a.m. ‘Initially they had six machines there,’ he said. ‘Then they asked for eight, and then ten, and then 15, 20, and then 25. I’m hearing that on the way there, so ...”