“... once been “Chettwynde”, which meant “the winding path” in Anglo-Saxon; and the suggestion took root in my head that poetry, my name and the road were, all three, mysteriously connected.’ Writing about travel and distant places often gains its force from the mixture of motives on the part of the traveller, the blend of self-extinction and ...”

“... of the Modern movement was beyond anybody’s control. The problems of how and why its suppression took place may or may not get analysed in a sequel. But at least it is left ...”

“... Sartre, a superior being slumming in the ranks, he gives hints of their complicity in the role he took on their behalf. ‘Hey Sartre you’re a philosopher, do you think I should ...’ a soldier asks, as if the obsessively independent thinker had finally been allotted a pastoral responsibility in the barrack-room. But Sartre the philosophical clown is a ...”

“... to complete what were expected to be the formalities. It was not Kitchener’s fault that these took another two years, as the Boers fell back very successfully on guerrilla tactics. But his method of combating these tactics, by a massive network of blockhouses dividing up the veldt into numbered squares, and the infamous system of ‘concentration ...”

“... respect for institutions and persons that have no right to respect.’ This determined disrespect took the form of explicit mockery of those who would censor him. ‘Look here, Low,’ says Beaverbrook in 1927, ‘your cartoons are giving great offence to my friends. I must ask you to reconsider your view of Lord Birkenhead, Mr Churchill and the ...”

“... have occurred to him was to note for us the shape of a stain on his breeches or how his mistress took her skirt off to go to bed. Coleridge liked to jot such things down, and Coleridge, like a modern writer, must privately have thought that everything about him must be fascinating to any reader. The new mimesis is thus really a question of the writer ...”

“... afford both to compete and to do its public duty. So it bought property, it built studios, it took on more and more staff, it flourished – and it grew. Soon it was the largest broadcasting organisation in the world. There was scarcely an aspect of television or radio production for which it did not itself accept responsbility. At one end of the process ...”

“... lists in the library as Doctor Zhivago slowly crept up on Lolita. During that year Nabokov took every opportunity to make snide remarks about Pasternak’s Zhivago in the course of his lectures. Among Russian friends he compared the novel to the works of Charskaya, a novelist who had been popular with pre-revolutionary schoolgirls. The most jaundiced ...”

“... to keep the philosophy of nature aimed at the moving targets of contemporary physical theory. It took us a generation to swallow the relativity of time: we can wait a bit longer, until we are sure we have understood what happened in the Big Bang, before we rejig our traditional notions of eternity. Nevertheless, something vital is missing from the particular ...”

“... ten months of 1997. During the mid-October meltdown, when the other ‘techs’ quoted on NASDAQ took a terrible beating, Amazon.com stock (AMZN) held firm. Investors have faith in it. On the other hand, and rather worryingly, Amazon.com is still not in profit. Nor is it clear when it will be. Bezos used to hazard late 1998. But asked by CNN a few weeks ...”

“... peace with one another, and will not for a different faith or a change of churches shed blood. It took the rest of Europe a century and more to learn that lesson, and Anjou himself, as King Henri III of France, would be stabbed to death by a religious fanatic – as it happens, a Catholic. But it would have been misleading to have left the story in 1573 (let ...”

“... from the other side of a discussion which, in Coleridge on the Imagination, he deliberately took back to first principles. The man who, at the onset of his literary career, had presumed a conflict of Science and Poetry subsequently rewrote the book as Sciences and Poetries, an infiltration of plurals which entirely changes the nature of the ...”

“... too early. A full-of-himself student in Nashville in the 1930s, he was taken up by Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, and most of his later academic appointments could be traced back to this connection. Not that Jarrell ever felt inclined to gratitude: another of his famous, and most joyous, thrusts as a reviewer was aimed at the vitals of his early Agrarian ...”

“... is imprisoned largely because of love-complications (the same applies to McCarthy’s young John Grady Cole). Tortured, immured, separated from his beloved, Habrokomes is given the relief of a dream: he thought he saw his own father Lykomedes in black clothing travelling across all the lands and seas and arriving finally at his prison where he ...”

“... John Bayley’s new novel is largely about those who are had on, or taken in, and this may well include his readers, who need to keep their wits about them. To begin with, he conjures up a couple of innocents. There was an innocent, too, as hero in his last novel, In Another Country, published in 1955. But Oliver, a young officer with the British army of occupation, was a worrier and a sensitive, risking trouble for the sake of his German girlfriend, and contrasted with his hideously successful rival ...”