“... De Quincey, who declared in his Suspiria that remembered dreams were ‘dark reflections from eternities below all life’, would not have been surprised that modern critical analysts try to discover master patterns, configurations of images or narrative elements, underlying all his writing, asking of what eternities below these compulsive patterns are the reflection ...”

“... a kind of envoi, but one with the opposite wish, namely ‘stay, little book.’ I was reminded of John Berryman’s epigraphs for his Dream Songs, from Sir Francis Chichester and Gordon in Khartoum: ‘For my part I am always frightened, and very much so. I fear the future of all engagements.’ There is something oddly and deeply touching about this fear in ...”

“... up at the Spanish port of embarkation, ‘there was a tapping on the glass. We sat very still and John rolled down the window, letting in a blast of cold and salty air and a whiskery face with bright blue eyes.’ This sounds like the authentic memory of a child, and it could have happened anywhere. The adult narrator probably put the salt into the ...”

“... marriages, television sets and cartons of milk. One thinks of Garrison Keillor, David Leavitt, and John Updike, whose most luminous descriptions are located in ‘the post-pill paradise’ of pleasure, estrangement and divorce. Thus the ‘normal’, whether a word, a category or a quality, loses its Larkinesque dullness and takes on an impossibly romantic ...”

“... accused Oscar Wilde’s father of sexual assault; the wife of the Victorian apocalyptic painter John Martin; a figure based on Edward Hopper’s painting Hotel Room; a girl caught up in a sexual abuse case; a woman prisoner. These monologues are all effective for the most part, evoking specific experiences and making their points without stridency: but they ...”

“... the mis-spellings and pointed out that ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume?’ was not uttered by one John Rowlands Stanley. A full-page picture shows Edward, Prince of Wales, at a sporting event with his jacket buttoned the wrong way, the photograph having been reversed; another full-page picture of a French singer has suffered the same treatment. Thus do the ...”

“... and to adopt the faith which was its inspiration. Would it be unjust to detect a hint here of John Roberts’s argument that, because the Third World generally chooses to wear Western suits and fire Western guns, we need not regret the price that they paid for European colonialism? Bartlett does note that the 20th century has incurred some of the costs of ...”

“... the destruction of privacy are different. The theme of impossibility is what gives her novel, as John Updike suggested recently in the New Yorker, its lovely echo of La Princesse de Clèves. But in the movie the impossibility is all there is. These people love their abstinence more than they love each other, and she loves it even more than he does. It’s a ...”

“... on the night before. Elderly troubleshooters have tended to be just that in America – shooters. John Wayne in True Grit creaked in the saddle, aimed straight, and punched people in the usual places. He uttered platitudes, but at least they were home-grown platitudes. Why was it felt necessary to dress Mr Van Cleef in preposterous robes, issue him with a ...”

“... with the aid of a coin edge. No such task presented itself. Instead a 4000-word letter from Mr John MacArthur introduced me to the world of plate-collecting. Eight million platers can’t be wrong and 450,000 joined the ranks in 1983 alone. Many of them bought heavily into Rockwell. The new offer ‘A Young Girl’s Dream’ is now available at £12.45 and ...”

“... distinction of that earlier generation of fellows: not just AJPT and Lewis, but Bruce McFarlane, John Morris, Rupert Cross, Cyril Darlington, J.Z. Young, Sir Peter Medawar, Gilbert Ryle ... the line stretched on. No doubt it was all more humdrum in reality, but one was left with the impression of great intellectual giants inhabiting a world of mad English ...”

“... the story of the genocide following Cülloden, must go to the ‘Fort Augustus’ section of John Prebble’s Culloden. It was published seven years before those historical books by Linklater but it isn’t in their bibliographies – nor is Prebble’s The Highland Clearances. No doubt they too are valuable but ...”

“... Anthony Trollope was a self-confessed workaholic. ‘If my success were equal to my energy,’ he remarked at the age of 55, ‘I should be a great man.’ He was also a compulsive writer. Ten years later, aware of advancing age, he told his son: ‘I finished on Thursday the novel I was writing, and on Friday I began another. Nothing really frightens me but the idea of enforced idleness ...”

“... David?’ said a poet. ‘Destroying all those beautiful things?’ It would be exciting, like a John Buchan romance, if the Rais of Iraq were to revive the worship of those ancient, aphrodisiac deities. It was good to meet the Governor of Babylon, successor to the prophet Daniel (whose shrine is in Kirkuk, next to Hosea’s), to feast in the open air ...”

“... Whig hero of Parliamentary liberty, Sir Edward Coke, ruled out votes for women; and radicals like John Lilburne, whose tiresomeness as a husband is enjoyably recounted by Fraser, did nothing to restore them, even though contested Parliamentary elections had become more frequent, and even though Parliament came in the 1640s to play a much larger part in ...”