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“... of China (1999), is exactly the same as Frisch’s: ‘You are the task. No pupil far and wide.’ Michael Hofmann, in The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka (2006), has ‘task’ too, but adds the word ‘exercise’, and his pupil is a student. I did once read, though I can’t remember where and can’t find in any of the probable books, a more ordinary, less ...”

“... décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis observes, it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ...”

“... whose views about art differed deeply from his own. He was overwhelmed on first meeting Wyndham Lewis, called him ‘a great and scandalously ignored painter’, and as late as 1932 said Lewis was ‘by far the most active force among us’. But he nursed feelings of resentment that his admiration was not ...”

“... had collected, such as James Archer’s Henry Irving as Charles I (1873) and John Collier’s Lewis Waller as Monsieur Beaucaire (1903), were really very fine. I had also begun to feel defensive about genre painting, which seemed to be eminently respectable when executed by 17th-century Dutchmen but was otherwise bafflingly taboo. Was it really so ...”

“... us on the edge of emptiness. Finley’s only previous film is composed of edited footage of Jerry Lewis doing his telethons, ‘a disease artist’, as Finley calls him. The film was all Jerry, pure performance, Jerry talking, singing, weeping, Jerry with his ruffled shirt open at the collar, bow tie undone, a raccoon flung over his shoulders, Jerry inviting ...”

“... words​ , reminiscent of W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’, come from Theodor Wonja Michael’s autobiography, Deutsch sein und Schwarz dazu: Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen (2013), translated into English as Black German: An Afro-German Life in the 20th Century. Born in Berlin in 1925, Michael was the ...”

“... During or just after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame or both, some not: but then, not now, was their moment. Was Connolly himself any good as a writer? The question means little because the point of Connolly turned out to be Connolly not producing ...”

“... in the face of intense criticism, adhered to policies that brought us safely through. Yet John Lewis Gaddis’s book prompts the thought that perhaps the time of the historian is not yet. To be fair, Gaddis makes much of the risks of writing contemporary history, but adds that if historians are not willing to run them ‘political scientists and ...”

“... that here we would all do well to bear in mind something an experienced Wall Street investor told Michael Lewis: ‘When I hear “Chinese wall” I think “you’re a fucking liar.”’ If I sound cynical and unsurprised about the manipulation of Libor, that’s because I long since stopped believing assurances of ethical conduct on the part of the ...”

“... public. Aldington was a determined outsider, like Henry Williamson and like his friends, Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell. They were all writers who were never quite fashionable in their own lifetimes and not likely to be in the future. All of them held cantankerous, right-wing opinions. There were aspects of Fascism which Aldington admired and he was ...”

“... to backwoods institutions, consider Harvard Medical School, which allowed Professor Judith Lewis Herman to purvey extravagantly exaggerated theories of ‘recovered memory’ syndrome. The same institution harbours Professor John Mack, who believes that beings from outer space are abducting men and women and conducting fertility experiments on them. As ...”

“... and Frost made jokes, but they didn’t have this trust in the other side of reason. It’s as if Lewis Carroll rather than, say, Dante were the measure of the world we have lost – the mood seems later because it is less nostalgic. The modern interest in the imagination, Stevens said, ‘is to be regarded not as a phase of humanism but as a vital ...”

“... as quickly as I managed to get a foot inside the door, I was sent a copy of Byzantium endures – Michael Moorcock. That one, icons iconing, balalaikas balalaikaing, kept me up nights marking pages, memorising passages, and dreaming dreams of a vividness and thrust that I hadn’t experienced since I was in the Army. My well-intentioned friends in Poland ...”

“... It cracked me up at 14 to hear my first psalm; the rotten apple sermons and poisonous C.S. Lewis readings in chapel; the half-hourly staggered bedtimes; the sardine bathtubs and lavatories-named-for the-seven-birthplaces-of Homer. My best memories are all to do with solitude and truancy (we had no studies, lived fifteen or twenty to a room; time by ...”

“... often alliterative exclamations – ‘Jumping jackrabbits!’ – talking insects, magic potions. Lewis Carroll is a powerful but ill-digested influence. George’s Marvellous Medicine exhibits most of the author’s characteristic strengths and weaknesses. George has a frightful Grandma, a wicked old woman with ‘pale brown teeth and a small puckered up ...”