“... In Northanger Abbey we learn that nothing very awful in the way of immurement or assassination of wives, or any such Gothic goings-on, can occur in an English village, because of its ‘neighbourhood of voluntary spies’. In this chilling phrase Jane Austen indicates the social benefits of gossip, and also implies with secret amusement that the moral benefits of novel-reading follow from the fact that the novel is a licensed vehicle for gossip ...”

“... Frank Kermode observed in a recent article that critics are always being needed to rediscover work that, for whatever reason, has gone silent. Good literature is more silent than one might suppose: it waits mutely on the shelves, it cannot attract attention to itself, and in the conditions of our own or any other time it could wait till judgment day without being found and proclaimed ...”

“... Some readers do not much like Margaret Drabble’s later novels because they are so different from her earlier successes. She may have lost one public and not as yet entirely won over another. Her novel writing career began brilliantly and precociously with A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), published when she was 24. Since then, the preoccupations of her novels have generally kept pace with what one assumes to have been her personal progress from Cambridge graduate, through marriages, pregnancies, growing children, marital complications, and high professional achievement, to what in 1980 – her 40th year – she memorably called ‘The Middle Ground ...”

“... The autobiographical fragment by Allon White entitled ‘Too close to the bone’, which was published in 1989 in the London Review of Books, has just been republished by the LRB, this time in book form.* Allon taught at the University of Sussex until he died in 1988 at the age of 37. He was the author of The Uses of Obscurity and (with Peter Stallybrass) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression ...”

“... The rainy season arrived here on 27 October. As the first warm drops fell, the dusty ground gave out an unfamiliar odour, sweet, pungent and musty. Cars slithered on the slick roads, and soft dates, knocked from the palm-trees, made walking dangerous. Hassan, our driver, turned up in a black suit with stripes like railway lines, to mark the end of summer ...”

“... Emily’s fans were once legion, and as reverential as mystics or poets. Indeed many were poets, like Robert Bridges, who sang that she had ‘all passion’s splendour’. Writers of all sorts revered her, from the anonymous Late Victorian critic who enthused over the structure of Wuthering Heights to the novelist L.P. Hartley, who doted on her whole oeuvre and personality ...”

“... Momentous changes in copyright law, such as those of 1710, 1842, 1890 and 1911, are preceded by periods of turmoil and radical uncertainty about the rights and wrongs of intellectual property. We are in such a period now. The problem, in the short term, is how the British Government will implement the ‘harmonising’ of the latest EU regulations on copyright ...”

“... Serious’ has become a cant word in a literary context, in rather the same way that ‘fine’ (‘she’s a fine person’) is the accepted fallback among clerics and do-gooders. As a general-purpose convenience word ‘serious’ is fairly recent: anything consciously Post-Modernist qualifies on grounds of technique; anything feminist or angry or otherwise committed, on moral grounds ...”

“... Second languages don’t come naturally to us, they have to be learnt, formally in large part and deliberately. The language we are born into the midst of is not learnt but ‘acquired’, by the occult, labour-saving means of Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device, an innate predisposition in our neurons which, once we are attuned to the local syntax and prevailing vocabulary, ensures that we eventually ‘know’ our native tongue without having had to try, and empty of memories as to how we internalised it ...”

“... It may be off-putting to think that great artists create to excite themselves sexually; yet in some degree this is probably the case. At least with quite a number. Although the obvious danger would then be including almost every artistic effect under the heading of the pornographic (‘everything he does is so artistic,’ as Anthony Powell remarked of Lawrence’s gamekeeper, quoting a song of Marie Lloyd’s), it might be tempting to construct a General Theory of Pornography in Art along these lines ...”

“... Authors can be terrible liars, and never more so than when they are in the autobiographical vein. Like salesmen, they are at their most dangerous when most sincere. Roth’s publishers trumpet The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography as the facts, a novelist’s autobiography – ‘Roth and his battles, defictionalised and unadorned’. It’s the more suspicious since Roth’s previous writings have played ducks and drakes with factuality and fictionality ...”

“... Many years ago, before soundbites and even before That Was the Week that Was, I found myself pushed by the late Brigid Brophy into taking part in an early TV quiz show. In those days such things were done in a touchingly amateurish way, with make-up persons fussing about and everyone, even the cameramen, looking highly nervous. It was a literary guessing-game, done almost like charades used to be at a country weekend ...”

“... Lionel Tennyson, the Poet Laureate’s second son, had what might be called an interesting marriage. Interesting from our point of view, however difficult from his own. Like everyone who married a Tennyson, Eleanor Locker had been in their circle since childhood. After her mother’s death her father married an American million-dollar heiress of unbending Quaker principles, and became Frederick Locker-Lampson, one of the arch little poets whose presence embarrasses the later pages of Q’s first attempt at an Oxford Book of English Verse ...”

“... At college I took a class in writing short stories. It’s a long time ago, but it stands out among the things that were happening to me at the time; and have happened, or not happened, since. The instructor always wanted us to be dry and precise. No gush please was his watchword. I was feeling pretty dry myself, so I thought I should be able to manage that ...”

“... Attentive readers of the Guardian’s news pages will already know about Arabesques. A 1986 report from Jerusalem told readers of a first novel by a 36-year-old writer which was making a big stir: it had already sold 22,000 copies. (An equivalent figure in Britain would be a hardback sale of 270,000.) A very important contributory factor behind the sensation the book was causing was the fact that its author, Anton Shammas, was an Arab writing in Hebrew, his ‘stepmother tongue ...”