“... some friends on 7 February 1994. You can pull out a book at random, open it at a marked page and read, scrawled in the margin, Gray’s reaction: ‘middle-class nonsense!’ Dallas told me he would sometimes return to previous marginalia and argue with his former self. There are books from his childhood – the Harmsworth Encyclopedia, for example – in ...”

“... of blarney in this passionately articulate novel, which takes certain surreal premises as read in order to conduct its mythic discussion of Irish histories. To grant these premises for the duration of a reading is in this case, as it is not in much ‘playful’ fiction, to be carried with great momentum into an unfamiliar but internally consistent ...”

“... state. The charge that used to be brought against Virginia Woolf was that she was not political. Leonard Woolf contributed to this myth both by saying that she was the most unpolitical person he had known and by publishing her diaries in the form of A Writer’s Diary and cutting out political and social commentary. This conception of the writer, disengaged ...”

“... It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations,’ wrote Sir Winston Churchill in My Early Life. In America this need was famously recognised by the publishers of the Elbert Hubbard Scrap Book, containing the 2,500 greatest thoughts. Hubbard went down in the Lusitania, but his book was advertised with great vigour for the benefit of tongue-tied partygoers who found their fellow guests talking about Nietzsche ...”

“... justifications of unauthorised biographers are no more than pious mouthings; who, really, wants to read an authorised biography? So take Jeremy Treglown’s apologia at the beginning of his Dahl biography with a pinch of salt. Ophelia Dahl plans to write the authorised version of her father’s life, with the approval of his second wife, Felicity, who asked ...”

“... even cannibalism. The exact proportions of the blending are open to dispute, though few read Homer’s poem as an unadulterated onslaught on war or the heroic ethos. Logue’s imitation comes close to being that. It is naggingly satirical, like an Iliad rewritten by Thersites. Logue begins with the Trojans in the ascendant, with both Zeus (angered ...”

“... We know what we are in for, just as surely as we do when we open an Agatha Christie or an Elmore Leonard. The formula is simple, repeated with variations in most of M.R. James’s 33 ghost stories, and still guaranteed to give pleasure today just as it did to those fuddled dons and sleepy schoolboys who first heard James ...”

“... and Thoreau, or it may have something to do with everyone needing health insurance. People who read novels in Britain and Ireland generally do so on holiday from work, or on the way to work, or in bed at night, exhausted after work, or at the weekend, dreading the return to work on Monday morning; but if you were to take the protagonists of most novels ...”

“... helped him get another job.Reacting against the fundamentalist Protestantism of his childhood, he read voraciously, turning to socialism and the philosophy of Nietzsche. He began to publish articles and aphorisms in A.R. Orage’s periodical, the New Age, and to meet Scottish intellectuals including the composer Francis George Scott (to whom Hugh MacDiarmid ...”

“... better than Dylan.’ Crosby briefly became Mitchell’s inamorato and produced her first album. Leonard Cohen, another influential early lover, helped too. ‘There was a certain ferocity associated with her gift. She was like a storm,’ Cohen said. ‘She was fully formed: uneducated, uninformed, uninstructed, unneeding of any kind of influences.’ Cohen ...”

“... die can tie his sin tap and’), is a translation of a concrete poem by Ernst Jandl. But if you read Bernstein’s libretto you will find a text more transparent, and much sadder, than the one Perloff describes. With Benjamin stuck at the Spanish border, near death, a chorus of angels sings a quasi-blues: ‘Knew a man once/Had no tongue/Walked in fog/Till ...”

“... of the literary culture: they pronounced on the subject endlessly, and their works can often be read as lamentations over the sorry condition of a world that has no place, no privileged or central place, for works like theirs. When Victorian literary men mused on the forthcoming challenge of Democracy, they tended to assume that, however rough things ...”

“... Self-respecting guys don’t read Westerns. In fact, unless you look carefully, no one seems to read them. The cowboy novel rates lower even than pornography in the scale of cultural visibility. W.H. Smith (true to their origins: they won a monopoly at railway stations in 1848 in return for an undertaking to purify the nation’s reading matter) recently banished their modest selection of top-shelf skin magazines ...”

“... as his own … Since he was a boy he had been in business of some kind but had never learned to read or write. He had to rely on pure instinct to know the people he could trust.’ Just as the word ‘gugering’ belonged to a world that was disappearing, the Shah is someone whose manners and habits are part of a time that has almost passed.The figure at ...”

“... of narrative in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry being so widely and respectfully read, and well-directed too, since it clarifies what’s confused in the Penguin introduction by the editors’ simultaneous recommendation of Post-Modernist ‘secrecy’ and the Keatsian ‘long poem’. The kind of story which flows from A to Z is clearly not ...”