“... printout of your novel, will you, Jenny?’ ‘Certainly not,’ she said. ‘But I want to read it. I just can’t lay my hands on it.’ ‘If someone gives you their novel, put it in a drawer,’ she said, ‘and take it out and read it when you can. But don’t lose it.’ ‘But I haven’t lost ...”

“... reading public without which literature cannot exist; and university teachers of literature ‘can read what they like and deconstruct or neo-historicise what they like, but in the classroom they should be on their honour to make people know books well enough to understand what it is to love them. If they fail in that, either because they despise the ...”

“... to the traditions of the earliest Sovietology has occurred. Founding figures such as E.H. Carr and Leonard Schapiro were renowned for their ability to write as knowledgeably about 1917 as about the latest political developments. Once again it is thought absurd to hold the Soviet past – which is only seven decades old – and the Soviet present in separate ...”

“... indicative of deeper cultural differences. One Soviet writer, having received a letter from a Mrs Leonard Osborne, opened her response ‘My dear friend, Leonard!’ American women sometimes worried that they didn’t know whether their pen-pal was a Miss or a Mrs; they were reassured that ‘it makes no difference. Here we ...”

“... peculiar features of Star Trek is that it does not, on the whole, appeal to people who actually read science fiction. The late James Blish, a distinguished author with a foot in both camps, guessed that the audience overlap in the Sixties was only about 10 per cent; and in their study of science fiction audiences, Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch note the ...”

“... its success when it opened on Broadway in 1943. In April 1944, the 25-year-olds Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein premiered a cocky, jazzy ballet called Fancy Free, which brought down the house. Its three sailors returned eight months later in On the Town, a balletically free-form Robbins-Bernstein musical set in New York in 1944. Appalachian Spring did not ...”

“... work was. Later he made advertising displays and did a little modelling for a hat company. He read a great deal, and made illustrations for Joyce’s Ulysses, which was banned and could only be read at the National Library. He lived for a while in a ‘weekender’ (a cottage in the bush) and tried to stow away on a ...”

“... most venerated writer’, Jack Macalister. Present is wife Sarah, who urges those present to read his books, the Macalister girls Dora and Emily, twenty years apart in age, and Jack’s friend and first publisher Charles Bremner, who was also Sarah’s lover. Funeral and reception over, we go back to childhood, when all three main characters grew up in ...”

“... beyond all praise for care and fullness’. At the end of his life it was an open commission from Leonard Rowe Valpy, Ruskin’s solicitor, which gave him the freedom to produce a cycle of landscapes based on ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ – paintings cited by those who wish to find proof that his poetic vision hadn’t faded. They are worth ...”

“... her condition and she turns immediately to the Bible which ‘fell open near the beginning. She read: “And the Lord set a mark upon Cain.” ’ The scar on Stephen’s face (the result of a wartime wound), which becomes livid at times of stress, functions as that mark. Despite Hall’s attempts to court the sympathy of heterosexuals by writing about a ...”

“... his mother said, ‘and gave us a military salute as he disappeared behind the door.’ She had read a piece in the Spectator that described the departing soldiers as modern crusaders, but she felt ‘there is something that they have that no crusader ever had, and it was shining in V.D.’s face today.’ Fernald’s ship docked at Le Havre, from where he ...”

“... index – of the Eugenics Society’s Charles Blacker, of Vera Brittain, Cyril Burt, G.D.H Cole, Leonard Darwin, G. Lowes Dickinson, E.M. Forster, Edward Glover, J.A. Hobson, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Storm Jameson, Ernest Jones, Sir Arthur Keith, Maynard Keynes, Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell Hart, Bronislaw Malinowski, Gilbert Murray, Philip ...”

“... such as Polygon and Canongate, writers like Alasdair Gray, Agnes Owens, Thomas Healy, Tom Leonard, James Kelman and Janice Galloway have found the city a congenial location for their life and work, and their success is encouraging others. Of course, Glasgow has always had its writers. Torrington’s late Sixties hero is himself a working-class ...”

“... in argument, and characterised, in most cases, by long limbs and large spectacles, they struck Leonard Woolf as ‘much the most remarkable family I have ever known’. His wife, on the other hand, who knew several Stracheys well, thought them ‘a prosaic race, lacking magnanimity, shorn of atmosphere’. The direct line has died out now. The family’s ...”

“... to each other until Roger Ackerley’s death) and Ackerley’s own sexual problems. I had read it, with great enjoyment, in a proof copy that Nancy had lent me. (Soon afterwards she gave me a bound copy inscribed: ‘Dearest Richard, I know you like this book, and you know I don’t! but here it is with my love, Nance.’) Forster had not liked ...”