“... well Committed, as Unamended, by Mr Pope in his late Edition of this Poet (1726), a title which we may think asked for trouble. In 1729 the poem became The Dunciad Variorum, slightly revised and now with elaborate encrustations of preface, commentary, appendix etc. The mock-epic had grown a mock-apparatus in which the judgments and the personal follies of ...”

“... the late Roland Barthes, ‘through which all the sciences which we now call social and human may successfully be exercised.’4 Eating was one of Barthes’s own best topics: bleeding steak, sugar, photographs of food in Elle, the psychosociology of crispy food, Fourier’s fruit compotes.Un Festin en Paroles is a product of this profoundly Chinese ...”

“... on basic research with the vague promise of beneficial ‘spin-off’. However eloquently they may continue to preach the simple gospel of the untrammelled search for knowledge, they know in their own hearts that this is not a faith on which they can rely for their daily bread. This disillusionment was inevitable: yet it ...”

“... sexuality to a mnemonic principle of classification by means of which ‘one man’s experience may be communicated to others, and the objects safely reasoned on while absent’. His system failed to achieve the dimensions of a philosophy, since it did not reveal the ‘constitutive nature and inner necessity of sex itself’. The Linnaean code, he ...”

“... openness or closed-ness, the drama has drifted away. Ginsberg says that his Collected Poems ‘may be read as a lifelong poem including history, wherein things are symbols of themselves’. But this is disingenuous. He is a very literary poet, even if a line in ‘What would you do if you lost it?’ says: ‘Campion, Creeley, Anacreon, Blake I never read ...”

“... In Marlowe’s Edward II, the royal favourite Gaveston plans delicious entertainments which ‘may draw the pliant king which way I please’. He will introduce musicians to the court, ‘wanton poets’, Italian masques by night, and ‘pleasing shows’. Edward, walking abroad, is to encounter pages dressed as ‘sylvan nymphs’, and Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape With hair that gilds the water as it glides, Crownets of pearl about his naked arms, And in his sportful hands an olive tree, To hide those parts which men delight to see, Shall bathe him in a spring ...”

“... cassettes in his cab and plasters the interior with coloured stickers containing the name of God may be pious – but not strenuously so. Islam is part of his lifestyle, but not the key to his identity. Islam and Arabism merge imperceptibly into one another. Although the two may conflict at the intellectual and political ...”

“... suggests: it is to establish in the only way possible that there is a major classic, which may be suitably called Gwendolen Harleth, hidden from the general recognition it deserves in the voluminous mixed work that George Eliot published – a classic it is incumbent on us to reclaim for English literature. It is Gwendolen Harleth who represents the ...”

“... of Harold Wilson is that he first embodied and then crushed the hopes of a generation. It may not have been bliss to be alive in October 1964 but, viewed amid the post-Thatcher debris of the Nineties, it does seem an almost unimaginably hopeful starting-point. The Tories were in a state of collapse, not merely politically but culturally: there was no ...”

“... it there a minute. For this business about going on one’s way rejoicing, as faithful Spark fans may already have recognised, is one of Muriel Spark’s favourite catch-phrases, along with such classics of the catch-phrase form as ‘crème de la crème’, ‘pisseur de copie’, ‘neither good-looking nor bad-looking’, ‘we must always think about les ...”

“... he looked at it, and saw his own face, and his own salvation, his own sexual nature. And that may be the problem. He saw himself too clearly, settled too many scores with that first book. Too much was fixed in there. Plimpton quotes something he said later on: Do you remember the young boy who goes to a crumbling mansion in search of his father and finds ...”

“... after 1918. ‘Not a great picture,’ Tomkins says of Nude; and Seigel remarks that ‘there may not be many people today who prefer Duchamp’s work to that of, say, Picasso or Matisse – nor should there be.’ It’s true that Nude has become one of the great clichés of Modernism, and a fashionable restaurant in Philadelphia has based its whole ...”

“... was a ‘land of liberty’, though liberty for whom and from what is less clear – freedom may well seem less tangible in a Sports Direct warehouse.Tory politicians have been keen to emphasise that their policy has strictly followed the science, rather than being dictated by any other concern; one of the justifications for the extraordinary powers ...”

“... developments’, quite lacking the crucial quality he called ‘unexpectedness’. The artist may sit down to write with all sorts of intention, but the properly living novel will swiftly evade them: ‘If you try to nail anything down in the novel,’ he wrote, ‘either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.’ There you ...”

“... of a lover will descend into speculations about the other woman (‘Only I wish her eyes may not be blue’). Mew’s own physicality – along with her relish for the physical – comes through strongly in Copus’s book. She had ‘something piquante about her’, a schoolfriend recalled, a way of turning round as she talked, ‘sort of pirouetting ...”