“... de Morgan. Human Voices unmistakably suggests an inwardness with life at the BBC, and Innocence a close familiarity with post-war Italy, Gramsci and various human deformities. Other novels hint at omniscience concerning Cambridge, and Russia in 1913. All this is inside information, which never seems to be got up or stuck in for the occasion, as sometimes ...”

“... Criticism for Frank Kermode is the articulation of assumptions, a sort of phenomenology of interpretative need. Its job, as he says in The Sense of an Ending (1967), is ‘making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives’. It involves close reading, discriminations of value, a practised affection for old and new texts, but its chief quarry is the turn of a culture’s mind, one of those trains of thought which Conrad thought could not be false – because even when they look horribly false they are embedded in arguments or entailments we need to believe are true ...”

“... important, he wrote Heartbreak House, published in 1919 and first performed in 1920. He was now close to being as famous as it is possible for a writer to be; and without ceasing to live as an honest man he did nothing to change that. One the whole his last lap began quite promisingly. It is well known that most people do not change much after sixty (or ...”

“... his last quarter-century. The break was quite sudden; gone were the days when Masefìeld was his close friend or, having toured the West of Ireland with John Synge, he illustrated in his sketches that author’s reports for the Manchester Guardian. Some of the results of his conversion are to be seen in the colour plates of this book, though of course they ...”

“... but Ayer was more flamboyant and far more likely to put people off. They were friends but not close, for the difference between their temperaments was great; for example, Ayer was uninterested in his Jewishness, while Berlin of course wasn’t. Despite the clarity of his mind and his prose, Ayer as lecturer was not easy to follow. He was aware of this and ...”

“... and the great variety of noises he could produce in illustration of his remarks, and Wain was his close rival in these arts. I knew Wain fairly well, not only at that time but off and on for the rest of his life; my acquaintance with the other two was much slighter. He had great talents and for a while must have seemed the leader of the pack. He more or less ...”

“... Good Thing’ – the one about the bereaved couple and the exigent baker – and ‘So Much Water Close to Home’, about the girl’s body discovered, but not reported, on a fishing trip. These are stories of high quality, as are many of the others. Now one can read almost everything in volumes published by the Harvill Press. There is quite a lot of ...”

“... a novelty. Normally there were only two theatres, the Haymarket and Drury Lane, both subject to close official scrutiny. As a manager Cibber had to deal with the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which had power over the actors as well as the plays; they might even appeal to him to settle an industrial dispute. Given its connection to the great world it was ...”

“... from Harriette Wilson about the meaning of the term ‘gentleman’ – a subject not really very close to Skelton’s heart. For an English autobiographer, she seems wonderfully free from snobbery, whether plain or inverted. But the presence of Harriette Wilson signifies because, like hers, these are the memoirs of a grande horizontale. I have never met ...”

“... are registered. The whole affair is exhilarating; these ‘waste products’ take you close to the processes of the trial, error and tested variation which carry an architectural idea forward from its beginnings on the back of an envelope to its final realisation. You get another angle on how architects think in the exhibition of ...”

“... page of typescript missing in the middle of the book. It sounds as if the novel is in a form less close to the final than, say, Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, but still close enough for readers to feel confident that they have before them what they need to make a reasonable guess at what Golding was up to; for they ...”

“... hand, the piece did seriously annoy Walpole. Perhaps its huge popular success made him afraid to close it down, or perhaps he banned Polly before it even got to the stage because he’d had enough, rather as Claudius in Hamlet sits through the Dumb Show but can’t take the play. As it turned out the ban did not seriously damage Gay’s fortunes, largely ...”

“... Abeginning​ is a very delicate time,’ we are told in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965), and again in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. None of that ‘a long time ago’ stuff, especially since we’re not talking about the past. The action takes place in the first months of the year 10191. The year is also mentioned in Denis Villeneuve’s new version, which echoes Lynch’s visual style, or at least the visual tendencies of the earlier film: vast buildings, every meeting place a parade ground; flying machines that look like overgrown zeppelins; uniforms and marching that recall the Russian empire or the films of Leni Riefenstahl; battles composed of men crashing into each other, as in the Middle Ages or Chimes at Midnight ...”

“... asylum. The one person with any insight into Dorothy’s misery is a young supply teacher called Frank Baum. Baum is an out-of-work actor, a man of eccentric interests who studies Turkish and tells the children how in that language he would be called Uz, because Uz means ‘frank’. ‘It means a lot of other things as ...”

“... when Conrad is most evidently enjoying his solitary meditations. Whereas James’s book is full of close friends and lovers, Conrad almost always represents himself as a lone observer, looking, asking, prying, collecting, then going home, wherever that may be, to hone his prose. On a trip around the United States some boring fellow travellers – a Welsh ...”