“... Carleton, is probably lost on most British readers, but it is a striking choice: Carleton’s short story ‘The Lough Derg Pilgrim’ (1828) portrays the business of the pilgrimage as, in Foster’s words, ‘a squalid racket’, depicted with the special vehemence of one who had been raised in the Catholic faith but abandoned it for the better bet of ...”

“... daughter (aged eight during the school closures that year) was sometimes required to read the same short passage five days in a row and to perform different tasks in relation to it. Presumably the idea was for her to learn how specific sentence constructions work, in the hope that she would be able to apply that knowledge elsewhere – but the invitation to ...”

“... his introduction to the Penguin Freud Reader, a very rich selection of Freud’s writing, long and short, which includes the letter to Romain Rolland, ‘Dora’, ‘The “Wolfman”’, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ and many less well-known pieces. ‘We are all Freud readers now,’ Phillips says, shifting the meaning ...”

“... middle to upper-class and purposively vulgar fanbase. In its ranks were Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and George Melly, who all later wrote of this time as of a lost Eden. Larkin’s jazz column for the Telegraph ran from 1961 to 1968, a period roughly coextensive with Mod’s quiet rise and noisy fall. Trads embraced a louche, boho scruffiness ...”

“... much she could have said to them, but she had met T.S. Eliot, too, and there was Priestley and Philip Larkin and even Ted Hughes, to whom she’d taken a bit of a shine but who remained nonplussed in her presence. And it was because she had at that time read so little of what they had written that she could not find anything to say and they, of course, had ...”

“... office or even one of the new universities. Here are the same harassed but well-meaning staff, short-handed, crippled by lack of funds, struggling to make the institution work despite all the curbs and cuts imposed by a penurious and ill-disposed government. After umpteen TV series the look of the place is quite familiar too, though not as lofty as the ...”

“... Dalí were all icons in this junior-varsity phase. But I remember being mesmerised, too, by a short documentary I saw in high school about art made by schizophrenics. (This would have been in the late 1960s, the heyday of R.D. Laing’s radical anti-psychiatry movement.) Most gripping were the magnificently demented illustrations of Louis Wain ...”

“... neither has achieved what might be anachronistically called its own symbolism. An anti-Modernist short story by Mary McCarthy tells of a creative-writing teacher in an American university who is informed happily by a pupil, as he finishes his fiction, ‘I’m just putting the symbols in’; there are moments in the two early tragedies (the arrows shot at ...”

“... and writes: ‘All my life/I felt my self’s lack of necessity.’ His best short story, ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, is set in a movie theatre where the narrator watches on, helpless, as his father proposes to his mother on screen. ‘Don’t do it,’ the boy pleads. ‘It’s not too late to change your minds, both of ...”

“... satire and romantic tragedy. It was such violations of classical decorum that so affronted Philip Sidney and caused him to rail against his contemporaries’ taste for ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’. Shakespeare liked nothing better than to tease or confound his audience’s expectations: he renders the tragic effect of Othello even more cruel by means of ...”

“... of Hayward’s work took, or who wrote it, or how closely it followed its source, or how long or short it was; but we can say that a playwright would have found in the deposing and killing of Richard the obvious focus of the play. As John Manning, the modern editor of Hayward’s text, observes, its ‘dramatic and narrative trajectory was aimed to express ...”

“... Malone. He was initially a sceptic: he thought Theobald had tricked up an old play, perhaps by Philip Massinger, with Shakespearean touches. His own copy of Double Falsehood survives, tartly annotated, especially where he found genuine echoes of Shakespeare: he thought the line ‘Throw all my gay comparisons aside’ (clearly parallel to ‘lay his gay ...”

“... slightly pathetic foreigner in crumpled battledress. He came to know Spender, Orwell, MacNeice, Philip Toynbee and John Lehmann, and was invited to their parties. The Tribune left-wingers adored him; Michael Foot (as he put it himself) ‘fell an immediate swooning victim to his wit, charm and inordinate capacity for alcohol’, and to his murderous style ...”

“... accounts of recordings made by Eliot, of stage and radio adaptations made by others – oh, in short, the lot! It is a phenomenal achievement; and although reading it cover to cover can feel like being stuck in some brilliantly devious Borges story, it surely sets standards that few succeeding editors of the complete works of poets of the last century are ...”

“... and did so with such ruthlessness that one friend suggested the book should be subtitled ‘A Short Cut to Unpopularity’. The prose of Eliot (with whom Graves was supposed to have collaborated on the study of modernist poetry he eventually wrote with Riding) is given a chilly slap: it ‘seems to shrink from the responsibility of “bestowing ...”