“... 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 ...”

“... be mistaken, as A Lifetime on Clouds was described to me, for the work of an Australian Catholic Philip Roth.If that were the case, however fine Tamarisk Row and its successor are (and they are), it’s unlikely you’d be reading this essay. Murnane’s international reputation, which has grown to speculations of a Nobel, rests on his novels and stories of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... lasted for a century or so, until the western Roman Empire limped to its end in the course of one short generation. Both silver and small change ceased to be minted, but the solidus and especially its one-third fraction, the tremissis, formed a thread between classical antiquity and the Latin Middle Ages. The story is similar, if somewhat more complicated, in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... no more bars … if you don’t stop now’ – and within a year had married the sociologist Philip Rieff. Now she wrote about Nightwood instead of imitating it: her adviser, Kenneth Burke, had once lived with Barnes in Greenwich Village, and what she ended up writing – she argued that the novel made beauty out of something dissolute, where T.S. Eliot ...”

“... and so eager to believe that the Muse of History doesn’t have to pay any attention to it? The short answer has to do with tact and tactics. He is afraid that even true claims for art will become false when stated; their very utterance will do them in, shift them to the realm of pomp and abstraction. The longer answer is found in the thematic arc of The ...”

“... the UK to piggyback on the publication of this book),* Purple America and The Ice Storm, and his short-story collections, The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven and Demonology. He also co-edited Joyful Noise, a collection of essays devoted to the New Testament. In The Black Veil Moody assumes the role of apostle. This book is a secular gospel, a modern ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... theories of The Da Vinci Code and the bestselling soi-disant historical studies that inspired them.Philip Almond surveys the torrent of claims and counterclaims in theological and popular literature across two millennia and sets out to show that Mary Magdalene has always represented ‘the sinner we should aspire not to be and the saint we should desire to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”