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“... Elizabeth Anscombe offered them a bed for the night if they were ever in Cambridge. Even Prince Philip is here, thanking Stefan for sending a copy of one of his lectures. Philip encloses a lecture of his own, venturing that ‘parts of it seem to fit your thesis.’ Running​ a small avant-garde press is always a ...”

“... fancy punctuation, dickface,’ said Morgenlander blithely. ‘Your licence is a piss mark in the snow, as far as I’m concerned.’ He adjusted his tie, as if his head were expanding and he needed to make some room for it. ‘Now tell Inquisitor Kornfeld about your trip to the doctor.’ ‘I’m seeing a specialist,’ I said. ‘To see if I can have the ...”

“... important basic point which is ignored in the standard Western literature is one made by Edgar Snow in the opening sentence of a little-known article written after visiting US troops in South Korea at New Year 1946: ‘When everything has been said about our occupation of Korea, probably the most significant thing is that we stopped a revolution ...”

“... Of Philip Larkin’s​ many ostentatiously ‘less deceived’ accounts of family life, among my favourites is the soaring riff that concludes his introduction to All What Jazz (1970), a collection of mainly unimpressed reviews of John Coltrane, Miles Davis et al that initially appeared in the Telegraph. ‘Sometimes I imagine them,’ he muses of the readers of his monthly column,sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year-old detached houses among the golf courses of Outer London, husbands of ageing and bitter wives they first seduced to Artie Shaw’s ‘Begin the Beguine’ or the Squadronaires’ ‘The Nearness of You’; fathers of cold-eyed lascivious daughters on the pill … and cannabis-smoking jeans-and-bearded Stuart-haired sons whose oriental contempt for ‘bread’ is equalled only by their insatiable demand for it… men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet ...”

“... his father’s throne, who, like an evil queen in a fairy tale demanding strawberries be picked in snow, counts on his rival dying in the attempt. Jason builds the Argo, gathers together a band of heroes and sets out for the Black Sea. Medea differs from other tragic heroes and heroines, from Oedipus or Antigone or Hecuba or Jason himself, in that she is the ...”

“... a Gothic spandrel. De Morgan’s strong unassertive style adapted well. It was cool enough for Philip Webb, but it could be robust. Norman Shaw used the tiles in the ‘Old English’ interior of the Tabard Inn at Bedford Park, the artistic suburb, built from the late 1870s, where the inhabitants ‘read Rossetti by Japanesey lamps’. De Morgan still ...”

“... Yet it’s a durable myth, the idea of the mailman as walking time-bomb: a cartoon version of what Philip Roth called ‘the indigenous American berserk’. The hero of J. Robert Lennon’s fourth novel is a postal carrier, a loner in late middle age, moderately disgruntled, deranged to an uncertain extent – raising concerns that he will storm his place of ...”

“... has no more substance than the idea that Inuit languages have an exceptional number of words for snow, but it flatters the notion of the English character as mildly eccentric – in a fundamentally likeable way. Quite when the idea emerges Harris doesn’t say, but by the time Thomas Love Peacock was describing a group of ill-assorted travelling companions ...”

“... American academic Morris Zapp, first seen in Changing Places, so Bates is the latest avatar of Philip Swallow, Zapp’s English foil: fussy, well-meaning, vain, hypocritical about sex, unable to resist a bad pun and, one fears, increasingly an old bore. Desmond starts his journal in response to the idleness and isolation of early retirement, an option he ...”

“... there – and very short of food. Then against the advice of the experienced Davis, who said the snow would not last, Cavendish turned back, with the notion of reaching the Far East by way of the Cape, having refitted somewhere in South America. The ships separated in a blow off Patagonia, and although the Roebuck rejoined, Cavendish, having blundered from ...”

“... I am nearly opposite in my tastes, but we did share our enthusiasms. Thom, for instance, thought Philip Roth was the cat’s miaow. I didn’t. ‘Try The Counterlife,’ Thom said. Which I did, and it dazzled me. Another time Thom said to me, ‘I’ve been reading Isaac Babel for the first time. He’s very important to you, isn’t he? Well, of course he ...”

“... of Victorian quack medicines), he exclaimed: ‘The cleanliness of the man! He was like snow and new linen sheets and cotton wool and red apples with the rain on them. One felt that he must even smell delicious, like hay or pears.’ Trying to persuade a friend to adopt vegetarianism, Shaw once assured him that his own evacuations were ‘entirely ...”

“... the apparent absence of ideology merely denotes its successful concealment. Writing in 1952, Philip Rahv warned that the rapid growth of American power and wealth after the war had created an illusion that ‘our society is in its very nature immune to tragic social conflicts and collisions.’ This was prescient. The prolonged postwar limbo, when the ...”

“... of modernist poetry and poetics, enough to justify asking him to write about, say, a novel by C.P. Snow (his first commission by Miller) in a venue like the Spectator?It seems that it was. The appearance of Romantic Image changed Frank’s life, and with surprising speed. Just as Miller commissioned his first review from him in its wake, so did ...”

“... to name than it is to find examples of people really doing it, or doing it well. A few, like Philip K. Dick, seem cursed to endure it as an abreactive symptom, a cry of protest at living through the 20th century. Lem belongs in that company of SF writers – Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Kim Stanley Robinson – who have practised intentional extrapolation with ...”