“... copies sold out on the second day, is Gyorgy Moldova’s The Heaven Cart. Mr Moldova is much read for his colourful and sometimes trenchant studies of the lives of working people, and he also has a way with titles. Earlier books include St Cow, an exposure of the working conditions of women in a textile factory, and The Person who was Touched by the ...”

“... the University Library – and went mad for him. So mad, really, that he never recovered. When he read Dante he said all the right things (‘pure muscle, nothing superfluous’) but drew no conclusions about his own use of language, which from the beginning until the end was always stiff with thou, yon, tho’, ere, o’er, thro’, oft and (wince-inducing ...”

“... as a poet. There are indications that he had been to Bologna to use its libraries and to read philosophy; he knew Latin and had most likely studied with Brunetto Latini, an eminent rhetorician more than forty years older than him; people were beginning to invite him to write poems and letters for them. But if it was now possible to surpass Cavalcanti ...”

“... June. Coming to the end of English Pastoral, James Rebanks’s second volume. It’s harder to read than A Shepherd’s Life, with the central section about the onset of factory farming not easy to take. Thankfully, though, in his own life at any rate the tide turns and Rebanks regains his grip on traditional farming and with it offers some hope, without ...”

“... of the latest scandal, the bugged phone call between the Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker-Bowles. I read none of it, as I didn’t read the earlier Diana tapes, not out of disapproval or moral superiority, just genuine lack of interest. I wish it would all go away. Sickened by the self-righteousness of the ...”

“... of ‘obscenity’). It says on page 3, wrongly, that in the same case John Mortimer defended Richard Neville, and on page 122 that he did not. In one of the brief excursions into cinema, there is a very muddled account of the French treatment of pornographic films. Pasolini’s Salo was not assigned to the ‘P’ category and sent to the blue ...”

“... the US as a sinister maritime republic with an all-powerful navy (Ahab is a fighting Quaker like Richard Nixon), Marvell hints at what the future may hold for a Commonwealth that has no institutional continuity. The theme of wounded male narcissism – the mower on a hot day mown, self-injured – may be one way of giving imaginative shape to what it feels ...”

“... however, it may well be the result of a consciously chosen policy. The key event here is the Richard Wilson exhibition of 1982-3, organised by David Solkin, whose thoughtful and carefully researched catalogue attempted to situate Wilson’s landscapes in a range of historical contexts including the moral and political ideas and ideals attached to the ...”

“... in The Oxford Book of Death. This gives me a sort of literary immortality, like the poets I had to read – or, on occasion, copy for punishment – in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury when I was a schoolboy. Now I am alongside Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and Dostoevsky. As a cleric of the established Church, I am ranking high. St Augustine, Bede, Jeremy ...”

“... of writing from the US that the then editor Bill Buford labelled ‘dirty realism’, taking in Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Bobbi Ann Mason and so on), has always belonged to her and her alone. ‘For me,’ she has written, this ‘no man’s land, a deeply specific isolation drenched in family stories and secrets, is a huge advantage for a ...”

“... remains broadly committed to the Marxist camp – a fact worth mentioning as it would be easy to read this book without realising it. This is because of its judiciousness, not its shiftiness. Its author has lived through so much of the political turbulence he portrays that it is easy to fantasise that History itself is speaking here, in its ...”

“... forces her into,’ wrote one member of the all female Co-operative Correspondence Club, who had read English and Modern Languages at Cambridge. Accidia, as she called herself, in reference to the melancholic depression she often suffered, bemoaned the need to spend all her time keeping the ‘horrid little house’ clean when ‘relieved of the ...”

“... All good Protestants are supposed to believe that when they read the Bible properly, the Holy Ghost assists them. So what happens when a good Protestant writes with the same assistance? Is the resulting text something like scripture? The orthodox answer would be no: the canon of scripture is closed, and the days of revelation are over ...”

“... and Memoirs – had covers easily recognisable as ‘SF art’. The jackets were designed by Richard Powers, whose unmistakable paintings were usually found on Ballantine mass-market paperbacks by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak and others. Powers’s designs screamed of the ‘paraliterary’, of druggy, trippy, sci-fi – just the boy’s ...”

“... Since this trouble with my back, I’ve read all the detective stories there ever were, I should think,’ a character says in Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House. ‘Nothing else seems to pass the time away so quick.’ My back is OK but I’ve spent the last 15 months reading detective fiction, most of it written between the late 1920s and the mid-1950s, an extended survey of the genre’s ‘golden age ...”