“... Mind first came out, Robert Paul Wolff, then a professor of philosophy at Amherst, wrote a short review in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. Let me quote from his prescient opening staves: Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned to look to Philip Roth for ...”

“... skin between each sheet of paper, you align them bottom edge and long side, tapping the long and short sides sharply together on the surface of your desk, and if you type sharply you can get as many as six or eight copies, each slightly fainter than the one before.) Refills and spares. A cornucopia of everything you would never run out of. Paper glued into ...”

“... ancient world, was a myth. But Sand also endorses the hyper-sceptical ‘biblical minimalism’ of Philip Davies, Thomas Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche, which regards such findings as irrelevant since, as they see it, the early history of Israel is actually a fiction that returnees from the Babylonian exile made up after the sixth century BCE. Sand seems ...”

“... In the Loop. How quickly Blair’s pose became exposed. As early as June 2000, his pet pollster Philip Gould was reporting their focus groups as saying that ‘TB is not believed to be real. He lacks conviction, he is all spin and presentation.’ It is a bitter irony that this image of him became fixed in the public mind just as he was beginning to embark ...”

“... in the future, he survived well enough on a small private income and some reviewing. He was not short of friends, including some as grand as T.S. Eliot, who admired Empson as well as finding him funny (‘dirtier and more distrait than ever … most refreshing to see him’). But the war was coming on; myopia left him unfit for military service, and ...”

“... the Accademia in Venice. The shape of the panels is crucial. Each is 35 inches high and a little short of 16 inches wide; originally they may have been a few inches taller top and bottom. The tallness and narrowness seem meant to amplify the idea of elevation in panels one and two – Terrestrial Paradise is followed by a scene in which the elect are ...”

“... think I am temperamentally a mystic, he says. He believes Wordsworth and Blake and George Fox and Philip K. Dick. But he excludes from the dimension of greater meaning the ascetic practices of the modern day. We engage in them, certainly: ‘hot yoga, ceaseless meditation, extreme fasting, various forms of detox, excessive exercise and compulsive devotion to ...”

“... with whom he never came to a lasting understanding was Montfort (yet another brother-in-law).In short, nothing could be less like the conventional idea of a pugnacious Plantagenet than the fair nine-year-old child who came to the throne in 1216, already weeping, in circumstances that would have taxed a Churchill or a Napoleon. Henry laboured all through his ...”

“... poems appeared he appalled friends by marrying Jane, the daughter of a stable keeper, and then got Philip Webb to build the Red House for his family just south of London. Although once canonised as the first modernist dwelling on account of its simple layout and truth to materials, Morris described it as ‘very medieval in spirit’. Perhaps too ...”

“... the same time’. Yourcenar’s career had begun.There is a picture of Yourcenar from 1936, hair short, expression neutral and collar turned up. Her eyes are still, her eyebrows bushy; her lips are held together but the bottom one is plump, available. She had started to throw her heart around a bit: she had an affair with a married mother called Lucy ...”

“... is it he’s less well thought of than, say, twenty years ago. Because he’s not long dead is the short answer and also, I suppose, because the literary scene has changed, with no one critic presiding in the way Connolly and (to a lesser extent) Raymond Mortimer did. The only time I met Connolly was in 1968 – when my first play, Forty Years On, was in ...”

“... Oddingley Grange on Trench Lane, whose châtelaine was a Mrs White, aunt of Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Robinson, commanding officer of the Royal Artillery 67th Field Regiment, Territorial Army. Lt Col Robinson approved, and a gruff handshake transformed my father into a second lieutenant, though he had to serve his time as a failed schoolteacher until June ...”

“... in McGahern’s early novels – The Barracks (1963), The Dark (1965) – and in some of his best short stories. ‘Gugering,’ Frank Shovlin explains in a footnote, ‘is the act of dropping seed potatoes into holes in the ground.’ Uncle Pat, he suggests, is a model for the fictional character ‘The Shah’ in McGahern’s final novel, That They Might ...”

“... Waugh once said, when a campaign to place a plaque to Matthew Arnold in Westminster Abbey was cut short by a letter from the Dean informing him that there already was one, ‘I am still sure that there is a point to be made, even if I am no longer quite so sure what it is.’ Besides, there is now, whatever negative view one takes of Murdoch, one huge thing ...”

“... Atlas discusses a scene in ‘Something to Remember Me By’, one of Bellow’s most affecting short stories. While Bellow does share with the character some similarities in family background, this hardly allows a supposition that Louie, in confessing to his son, is revealing the circumstances of Bellow’s supposed failure to mourn. Atlas ...”