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“... Our house was often filled with peasant leaders, trade-union leaders, radical poets, essayists, short-story writers, and occasionally, not encouraged too much, members of the family, or old family friends. In Pakistan, the Communist Party was banned, and two of its leaders, Muslim intellectuals from India who’d been sent to fertilise the barren land which ...”

“... Short-term​ thinking has been the fatal tendency of the Conservative governments to which Britain has been subjected since 2010. David Cameron’s declaration in January 2013 that, if the Conservatives won the next election, they would offer a referendum on membership of the EU – which wasn’t a significant concern, never mind a priority, for British voters – is a fine example ...”

“... A writer, born around 1890, is famous for three novels. The first is short, elegant, an instant classic. The second, the masterpiece, has the same characters in it, is much longer and more complicated, and increasingly interested in myth and language games. The third is enormous, mad, unreadable. One answer is Joyce, of course ...”

“... My mother is such a bloody rambling fool,’ wrote Philip Larkin in 1965, ‘that half the time I doubt her sanity. Two things she said today, for instance, were that she had “thought of getting a job in Woolworth’s” and that she wanted to win the football pools so that she could “give cocktail parties” ...”

“... Rainbow (1973), though he has also published Slow Learner (1984), a collection of his early short stories, and another novel, Vineland, in 1990. He started work on Mason & Dixon just as Gravity’s Rainbow was winning the US National Book Award. It has taken him a quarter-century to cross the t’s and dot the i’s.Pynchon is famous for three main ...”

“... human rights, the environment, ending the Cold War and reforming the Soviet Union. He bought a short-wave radio and listened to the BBC and the Voice of America. He felt compelled to speak out on the fundamental issues of our age and put down his ideas in a passionate essay on Progress, Peaceful Co-existence and Intellectual Freedom. The essay, which ...”

“... Mary McCarthy was chivvying and being chivvied all over Manhattan, Saul Bellow submitted his first short story for publication in the student magazine of Northwestern University. (It took third prize in the competition.) Entitled ‘The Hell It Can’t’, the story was intended to rebuke Sinclair Lewis’s Popular Front novel It Can’t Happen Here. I once ...”

“... conversation) that he has never been introduced to Woolf’s work: ‘My book’s sub-plot is Philip K. Dick, sales-talk, Hollywood and schitzophrenia.’ So I’m forced to describe Woolf in terms of Dick’s excellent ‘straight’ novels of the sliding life in the Western States, In Milton Lumky Territory and Humpty Dumpty in Oakland. The keenest ...”

“... rally. What happens between the Western reader and his book will always be intriguing. But short of some bibliometric equivalent to Masters and Johnson, it’s hard to see how the sociologist can ever penetrate the mystery. A question which recurs time and again in reading Mann is why sociology doesn’t work for literature. Take his stab at defining ...”

“... to correct misunderstandings before they become irremediable, to seize the fateful moment – in short, his failure to get the hang of life – is the failure of a certain common sort of Englishness, muted, passive, buttoned-up and sad. It is a failure articulated and mourned elsewhere in English literature – for example, in the poetry of Hardy, Stevie ...”

“... edition of that play in five years, following hard upon Harold Jenkins’s magisterial Arden and Philip Edwards’s serious Cambridge version.1 It may well be asked by non-Shakespearians and non-publishers whether all this editorial activity is needed, and by whom, and the Oxford team anticipates the question by asserting the boldness as well as the ...”

“... a telegraphese for journalism and academic use alike – to subsume the period under two poets, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Their contemporaries can then be located at intervals on the line stretching between these two not wholly imaginary points, with Robert Lowell appearing now at one end, then at the other. An ill effect of this rough-and-ready ...”

“... by the sword, taking rhetorical risks sometimes almost as fatal (in career terms at least) as Sir Philip Sidney’s neglect of his thigh-armour at Zutphen. He is particularly good on the dangers young would-be courtiers ran into in the 1590s when the dominant literary modes for pursuing advancement shifted from love poetry and pastoral to a mock-rebellion ...”

“... fictionalised: a tragicomic riff on the Calverley story. A Yorkshire Tragedy, by contrast, is short and terse. No names are used: the speech headings are just ‘Husband’, ‘Wife’, ‘Servant’ and so on. Some of its wording comes direct from the Butter pamphlet, but the story is compressed into a dark, claustrophobic parable.In these twinned plays ...”

“... mostly priests and nuns, smoke, drink and drive far more than any other population worldwide. In short, the restrictions are not respected: the shops in fact serve around 41,000 customers and the Italian state simply accepts the considerable loss in tax revenue. As the auditors commented, the income is welcome, but being responsible for unloading tax-free ...”