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“... broadsheets very much higher on the cultural scale than the tabloids. Still, it’s true I’ve read the Sun or the Mirror or the News of the World only occasionally, when one of them happens to be in front of me, and then with a kind of despair that grows like creeping paralysis over the will. I had the same reaction as I ...”

“... future victims fingered. There are writers who claim, with various degrees of credibility, not to read their critics. Pope was candidly addicted to the outpourings of his. He collected their work because he was out to take possession of them. The Dunciad, one of the darkest yet most ebullient poems in English, was to be the bestiary for his literary ...”

“... in and around his life, and I mean it in the tradition of comedies like the final episode of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, which, after episode upon episode of darlings and foilings and cross-dressings, ends in 1917 with our not exactly heroes climbing out of their trench and running towards the enemy lines. What constitutes the life ...”

“... of translators’ ‘zeal’ that ‘remains silent’. In the publishing industry, editors who read a foreign language are few and far between, while bilingual readers of ‘minority’ literature are as much in danger of extinction as the languages themselves. Recommendations, and indeed zeal, are needed from translators. In their recent books about ...”

“... involves a break with Deconstruction. Norris argues in this book, as he has argued before, that Richard Rorty’s formalist reading of Derrida as a dissolver of truth and objectivity is wrong: Deconstruction may expose particular areas of aporia or vertiginous bewilderment in the logic of interpretation and explanation as these things are practised in the ...”

“... of value, though, that ‘mere’ is profoundly wrong. Mid-17th-century verse rarely asks to be read as part of the oeuvre of a single author. Instead, it thrives on miscellaneity. This long and damnably difficult to live through period produced an extraordinary quantity of poems which deserve to be appreciated as ephemera. Poems to named individuals, poems ...”

“... On the day after Kate Atkinson’s first novel won the Whitbread Prize, the Guardian’s headline read: ‘Rushdie makes it a losing double.’ Thus Rushdie is reminded of his disappointments, Atkinson gets no credit, and the uninformed reader assumes that this year’s Whitbread is a damp squib. But read on ...”

“... to the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but also condemned as a melodramatic mishmash. First, Richard Bernstein (last December in the New York Times) called it ‘a startling, piercing work of fiction with a strong claim to being Singer’s masterpiece’. Bernstein kvelled about its ‘largeness, the depth and complexity of its exorbitantly ...”

“... unpunctuated prose-poems and cute little seven or eight-liners in free verse in the style of Richard Brautigan. (A Californian professor once plucked a volume of Brautigan out of my hand and hurled it to the ground claiming it was causing the Death of Literacy on the American Campus.) The stories are stronger, but with a maximum length of four pages they ...”

“... required of the reader varies greatly from lecture to lecture. If it is impossible to read this through as one normally ‘reads a book’, it is even more impossible to review it as such. A reviewer who tried to do that would end up writing 16 separate reviews. Rather than attempt the impossible (or at least the impossibly boring), I shall focus ...”

“... she still manages to give a disinterested commentary. Most judgments are benign, or neutral: Richard Long’s and Hamish Fulton’s documented walks tap ‘a narrow, poetic vein’; Gilbert and George ‘have succeeded in charging their surroundings with positive unease: offset by their passivity everything becomes art’; Barry Flanagan’s hares had ...”

“... career (in his chapter on Marvell, Milton and Dryden) without reference to Lawrence Lipking or Richard Helgerson. The Forster-Dickens chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton ...”

“... famous because it seemed to recount her adventures with Liszt. Few people now have heard of it. As Richard Bolster and Stock-Morton both observe, her novels are as mediocre as most 19th-century romans à clé. According to Stock-Morton, a modern Marie d’Agoult would probably have visited a psychotherapist instead of writing fiction. No one should regret the ...”

“... situation of 1930s Germany, with the architect modelling the relationship of ‘Hans Pfitzner or Richard Strauss, or Furtwängler, or Paul Hindemith to a patron resembling Goebbels’. He suggests that Prince’s early poetic experiments were ‘influenced by the styles of political, economic and literary criticism as these were presented – or, as some ...”

“... all the more remarkably since Cromwell had never been to a military academy or, as far as we know, read a book on strategy (or any book much except the Bible). His insistence on speed was also Napoleonic: ‘Hasten your horses, you must act lively’; compare the emperor’s instructions to Masséna: ‘Activité, activité, vitesse!’ Similar, too, was ...”