“... and at some length. Twenty-four years ago, reviewing Enright’s Bread Rather than Blossoms (for all practical purposes his second collection – leaving aside, that is, his 1948 Season Ticket, published in Alexandria), I exhorted him to remember ‘the deeper reaches (and so the deeper humanity) of the art he practises’. I wish I saw clearer ...”

“... No expensive talk about Descartes, Marivaux, Lemprière and Aristophanes can procure a pardon for that sort of thing. Other reviewers may commend Thomas Harris for committing ‘not a single ugly or dead sentence’ but Amis finds enough of them to label Harris ‘a serial murderer of English sentences’ and Hannibal ...”

“... Germany has a 70-year post-mortem rule, as opposed to 50 years in the UK, and a greater reverence for authors’ ‘moral rights’; whereas the Anglo-Saxon, Brito-American book trade has traditionally been petty bourgeois about the sale of literary property, assuming authors to surrender all claims when the rights are sold to the publisher. A principal ...”

“... way as a literary journalist in the days of Addison you might have done well to begin by heading for Button’s coffeehouse in Russell Street where the great man held court, and be as submissively impressive as possible. Almost three hundred years later, though sadly not for very long, you could make your way to the ...”

“... critic, essayist and lyrical memoirist Alfred Kazin filed a field report from an after party for a Commentary magazine symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm.) Kazin had been unable to ...”

“... flourishes which his opponents saw as insufferable arrogance. An ardent propagandist for so-called Basic English, a project which reduced the language to a mere 850 words, Richards was also a precursor of today’s global industry of English-language teaching. He published some founding, now forgotten texts in modern methods of language ...”

“... terms of that choice – Josipovici is in the business of interpreting texts, and only has time for theoretical diversions when they happen to point up a reading or adorn a theme. Yet it is fair to remark that these essays (based on his Northcliffe Lectures for 1980-81, delivered at University College, London) could ...”

“... one wonder that one man, however various his experience, could know so much about so much. Yet for reasons already hinted at there is a certain narrowness of view. For example, he can be critical about the public schools, especially as they were in his own day, when the syllabuses were so confidently and absurdly ...”

“... In 1591 the Corporation of Dublin set aside as the site for a college the lands and dilapidated buildings of the Augustinian priory of All Hallows, which had been given to the city at the dissolution of the monasteries. A year later, on 3 March 1592, Queen Elizabeth issued a charter incorporating ‘the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity near Dublin’ as ‘the mother of a university’ with the aim of providing ‘education, training and instruction of youths and students in the arts and faculties ...”

“... learns how to endure, if never quite outwit, a dark regime of sentences such as ‘One feature for which the Lit Supp has always been famous is its cantankerous letters,’ or ‘One of the happiest events for the Lit Supp in 1916 was Virginia Woolf’s return in the spring to health, and to its reviewing ...”

“... Coast, becoming established there and elsewhere as what one could talk about after having talked for long enough about feminism, deconstruction and literary theory. The term may have been coined by Stephen Greenblatt in an essay of 1982; if so it was already a restrike, minted from a prototype used by Wesley Morris in 1972 or perhaps by Roy Harvey Pearce in ...”

“... prestigious and contentious, prized and reviled, theory was a way of amassing cultural capital for oneself as well as a source of genuinely exciting insights. Guileless souls content simply to read Jane Eyre now languished in the outer darkness, while their more glamorous colleagues, hotfoot from Paris or New Haven, brought the resources of narratology or ...”

“... the appeal to objectivity will no longer do. Indeed, any such appeal may even be suspected – for instance, in the case of Huckleberry Finn – of masking a racist bias. Booth does not admit a racist bias in the invoking of academic norms, but he is convinced that the peremptory dismissal of Moses’ challenge to a canonical work was profoundly wrong and ...”

“... in a place called the Library of America, which is the name of the edition of which these volumes form a part. How does he look, posing for posterity alongside Poe, Jefferson, Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London, Harriet Beecher Stowe and others? Is he smiling at some of the company he is keeping; frowning momentarily at the ...”

“... on the crumbling ramparts of higher education, academics need to keep their powder dry and prepare for a prolonged siege. Although monetarist economists and cost accountants may feel reasonably safe, Norman Tebbit has recorded his dim view of effete scholars who study tribal customs on the Upper Volta, while Sir Keith Joseph’s hostility towards the social ...”