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“... meeting him in 1960: ‘Maschler drove me to a Booksellers’ Association in Bournemouth, when we were both still under 30, and discussed life and letters for the entire journey. As we arrived he told me how much he had enjoyed the conversation as he felt that he’d learned much about me: “You see, I’ve heard you ...”

“... the novel. Shakespeare was instinctively interpreted: Coleridge was Hamlet, Lamb claimed that ‘we see not Lear but we are Lear – we are in his mind.’ Readers began not only to identify with his characters but to see them personified all around. Bate makes brilliant use of this ...”

“... him down, you Swazi warriors’ and (when transmogrified into Asian wolf-cubs): ‘Akela! We’ll do our best!’ A Scout is a friend to all and a brother to every other Scout, no matter to what country, class or creed the other may belong. (At least, that was the rule when I was a boy: it’s been trimmed down since. The Scout Laws are not ...”

“... belong to a particular class. The three C’s are for other people. In repudiating the categories, we repudiate, in one sense, the society we live in – a very practical example of Marxian alienation. And a significant one, because caring, culture and class are all more or less modern concepts. ‘Caring’, the imperative ...”

“... of golf, cricket, rowing and fox-hunting than to professional footballers. By the time we reach the letter B, the tone of the volume is unmistakably established in two scrupulously mandarin pieces by Lord Trend on Bridges and Normanbrook, his predecessors at the Cabinet Office. Here, elegantly catalogued and lucidly unfolded, are the qualities ...”

“... major cities. Miles’s account of Burroughs’s childhood and adolescence is the last word we’ll need about this period. What’s most striking are descriptions of people and events that are woven through Burroughs’s work as unexplained but strangely recognisable ectoplasms from childhood. His late books are suffused with feeling, melancholia ...”

“... she was tapped on the shoulder by Virginia Woolf, who said, somewhat dampeningly, ‘Remember: we won this for you.’ Nearly twenty years younger than Woolf, on the threshold of adolescence in 1914, Lehmann was more ambivalent about the past. The world before the war was her childhood, it remained sealed off, a self-contained idyll whose certainties gave ...”

“... the screenplay of Ben-Hur – ‘I suspect that Heston does not know to this day what luridness we managed to contrive around him’): essays which were reprinted in various collections and have finally come to rest in United States: Essays 1952-92, a lap-buster of nearly 1300 pages. In 1995, Vidal wove his memoirs into a dance of the seven veils called ...”

“... to be other than German, doubtless prompted by a fear of his real identity being discovered. We now know of his East Prussian birth, yet his German police registration card for 1908 described him as having been born in San Francisco in 1882. (Since the vital records of San Francisco were burned in the great fire of 1906, this was a safely uncheckable ...”

“... our desert of failure, impaled, unappeased. And inhabit that desert of canyon and dream – till we carry to the living blood, fire and red flambeaux of death’s proletariat. The iron in your arms! At last, spanning this history’s apollyon chasm, proclaim them the reconciled. The Elegies earned wide critical acclaim and the first ...”

“... On my father’s bookshelves, tucked between yet another novel by Somerset Maugham and J.B. Priestley’s account of a journey to Mexico with his archaeologist wife, was a copy of Carry On, Jeeves. I had never heard of P.G. Wodehouse and racing through these stories of a master and his manservant I was surprised to find that, so far as I could tell, they were seriously funny and devoid of serious meaning ...”

“... has not disclosed the law of permutation that governs its intricate set of intertwined plots, but we learn in an epilogue that the novel is in fact the work of one of its characters, Lewis Lewison, an aspiring writer (his first poems are published in Locus Solus, ‘a little magazine whose reputation was unrivalled’), and a no-holds-barred masochist. In one ...”

“... finding its models (and they are very obviously to be detected) in Dickens, J.B. Priestley and Somerset Maugham. It is these antecedents which bring out the work’s true individuality. This consists to a very large extent in the dégustation, as the French say, of boredom: excruciating, fascinating, endless banality, interspersed – not varied ...”

“... in those first years was very fierce, very dangerous and it had to be controlled ... We know we committed some excesses, and your case is just one of them’: he would have been more prudent to have protested some years later. The treatment of political prisoners under Castro as described here was a great deal ...”

“... even if she seems it now. But she also dreamed of a rare type of marriage, one ‘in which we would be companions and friends, a marriage in which each member would perform his or her role, and in which neither role, least of all the kitchen one, was looked down upon’. If she had found that, she might have succumbed. As it was, she accepted a visit ...”