“... my classes, I inevitably received a few complaints. Some have stuck in the memory. ‘He made us read a whole book by Hume.’ Or the student in a class on 19th-century intellectual history who grumbled about having to read books from the anthropology and biology sections of the library; surely that wasn’t part of a ...”

“... inheritances of Ulster: The linen mills, the long wet grass, the ragged hawthorn. And one read black where the other read white, his hope The other man’s damnation: Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save – as you prefer – the King or Ireland However, one of the most important reclamations of ...”

“... of the Larkin oeuvre by way of his Sapphic schoolgirl jottings and taste for mannish women. For Richard Bradford, however, it’s still 1993. ‘Left-leaning commentators’, in league with ‘academics and other members of the literary establishment’, are gunning for Larkin and Amis from all sides. With no Clive James or Martin Amis to stand up for the ...”

“... own present inability, aged 50, to imagine what it is like to be 50. I’ve heard a lot about it, read plenty, seen numbers of 50-year-olds, both depicted and in real life, but that seems to be no help at all. This isn’t surprising. The 50 that I seek to understand is the same 50 I wondered about as a child, it has nothing much to do with having lived for ...”

“... for many years: it described the wrong kind of heroism.* Starving Leningraders, she wrote, read War and Peace for encouragement: Tolstoy’s characters were the best measure they could find for their own extraordinary feats of survival. Russian historians estimate that 27 million Soviet citizens died in the Great Patriotic War between 1941 and 1945 ...”

“... influence of religious drama, on the other hand, is largely silent, in the sense that it cannot be read off from the page. It is there, not in the text, but in staging and situations, like the mocking of York before his murder in Henry VI Part 3, or in the readiness to have at the centre of a scene an actor who doesn’t speak and is therefore non-existent on ...”

“... to his own ‘transfixions’. And yet what feels artificial on the page may be oddly natural when read aloud. (Agee said that the whole book should be read aloud.) The idea of a rigorous accounting, as if to ratify an oral history that these people cannot speak themselves, is among his strongest motives. So one comes to ...”

“... a mention. ‘Are you some kind of highclass tout?’ he asks. ‘Which books of mine have you read?’ But this dream fan is for real, or so it seems, and the two of them fall to discussing the reasons for Highwood’s neglect. The reasons, they agree, are obvious: because of his unflinching left-wing views, Highwood has been evileyed by ‘dominant ...”

“... but to engage with an experience which might otherwise have destroyed her. The scriptures she read during her captivity taught her that deliverance lay in not averting her eyes. They were her eyes. When her wound pains her, she turns to Psalm 38.5-6: ‘My wounds stink and are corrupt, I am troubled, I am bowed down greatly, I go mourning all the day ...”

“... class is amusing, Jilly Cooper has not let her subject down. She quotes the Registrar General and Richard Hoggart and Michael Young, while writing in a manner that falls somewhere between Nancy Mitford and a Daily Mail column. Her characters are fun, her observations acute, and since she does not try her hand at analysis, it is hard to fault her. Yet the ...”

“... hellish’ onset of night as a black pall lowered without the reassuring interval of dusk. Richard Mabey stands admirably within this tradition, not only as a naturalist and writer on British flora and fauna, but as an expert on inner and outer weather: his Nature Cure (2005) records a bout of severe depression and a re-emergence two years ...”

“... more than passive admiration. There is a 1940 portrait of Crisp in the exhibition. You can read in it the dedicated model’s preternatural awareness of self. A sitter with no talent for self-presentation could stymie the photographer. But McBean had something to offer beyond complicity with the sitter’s self-projection. He was a craftsman; his ...”

“... are too high, supermarket prices too low; TV steals readers, except when it doesn’t (thank Richard and Judy). Nobody buys books. In fact, they do: the annual turnover of the British publishing industry is now £2.8 billion – a little more than fish or cheese and a little less than bread. That’s right, bread. The UK bread market is worth £2.9 ...”

“... until it’s lost? That paradise is a name for a favourite form of loss? He can plausibly be read as saying any of these things, and perhaps more than one at once. But the propositions are not identical, and it’s not easy to choose among them. Can’t we look at what Proust actually wrote? We can look at what he literally wrote, but that’s not quite ...”

“... And persuaded as I am that I shall not offend their modesty, for the reason that they will never read this book, it is both with childish pleasure and with a profound emotion that, being unable to record the names of so many others who undoubtedly acted in the same way, to all of whom France owes her survival, I transcribe here the real name of this ...”