“... they seem faintly to shadow, but more private intensities of self-contemplation: they work, in short, as ritual games and puzzles, effective by their exclusions – their interesting mix of violence and nullity the opium, perhaps, of the English rectory and manor-house during the troubled inter-war period. With an extraordinary unanimity, good ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... no doubt, is a complex figure, though less so than that strange mixture of villainy and conscience Philip (Junius) Francis, who aided Burke in the indictment, possibly out of repentance, and attended his funeral in 1797; he was a true sociopath, here unforgettably described in the most remarkable secondary portrait in the book. Seven years of great oratory ...”

“... They were supplied forthwith: Titian’s ‘Rape of Europa’; Rembrandt’s 1636 self-portrait; a Philip IV by Velazquez; Rubens’s Earl of Arundel – all for what seemed at the time phenomenal, that is to Say, ‘American’ prices. The proceeds from this stupendous bonanza enabled Berenson and his wife to instal themselves in I Tatti, already dreaming ...”

“... threats and intellectual gestures, seems far away, but almost as distant is the world of Philip Larkin, with all its equally carefully set-up shabbinesses, contrivances and confidences which only ten years ago seemed an exact and honest image of the way people actually lived. To the poetry of every age its dream and image of itself, but there seems ...”

“... M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates detailed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Ptolemy I, had been Alexander’s general, boyhood friend and tutorial partner at the court of Philip II in Macedonia, where they were taught by Aristotle. In 331 bce, after Alexander’s conquest of Egypt, he and Ptolemy travelled across the desert to the oracle at the Siwa Oasis, who proclaimed Alexander the son of Amun, the Egyptian king of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”