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“... by the Dambusters), a scale model of which still stands in the grounds.A thousand years earlier, Paul of Caen and Robert the Mason began the transformation of the Roman shrine to St Alban, the first British Christian martyr, into a Norman church of handsome proportions, eventually dedicated in 1115. A succession of ambitious and not always scrupulous abbots ...”

“... of the chapters, influencing its tone and content. They are Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Stephen Crane, Scott Fitzgerald, Conrad – and H.P. Lovecraft. The last-named crops up almost as a joke when Smiricky’s girlfriend buys some farcical ‘sex-aids’ at a ‘Lovecraft’ shop: he tells her to read H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories in much the same way he ...”

“... that recurs in the novels and Gibbon often recalls Old Mortality, the crazed Cameronian in Scott’s novel who haunted the area’s churchyards, devoting his life to the sisyphean task of keeping legible the mossed-over memorials to the Covenanter martyrs of 1685. Gibbon, in one of his many parts an expert archaeologist, has a similar devotion to old ...”

“... could not and perhaps did not want to understand’. How much better if the Scots artist William Scott had not tried to explain the force which impelled him to introduce frying pans and kitchen objects into his works. Their ‘multivalent symbolic significance’ at first reflected the ‘elemental life of the simple poor’ and then became ‘the components ...”

“... as well.’ He contrasts the revered translator Richard Howard’s version of a 1930 love poem by Paul Eluard with Beckett’s rendering – and there is no doubt that Beckett’s unpunctuated cascando, composed in the heraldic mode of courtly love, and signed ‘Thine in flames’ communicates the French original’s outpouring far beyond Howard’s more ...”

“... Paul Johnson’s thousand-page book is geared to the present age of long print runs and mass marketing. It is one of the currently popular narrative histories written by Britons who position themselves mid-Atlantic, in order to address the American reader. At a thousand pages Johnson’s book is longer than Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1988 (subtitle, ‘Economic Change and Military Conflict, 1500-2000’), or Simon Schama’s Citizens, 1989 ...”

“... is pitching it a bit strong. Certainly Chenoune has read his Chateaubriand and his Proust, his Scott Fitzgerald and his Ernest Hemingway, as well as the Tailor and Cutter and Journal des Tailleurs; he has studied a history of the Hawaiian shirt and he knows where to put his hand on the fanzine called Sniffin’ Glue. His objective approach is praised in a ...”

“... of Westminster Abbey or There Will Be Blood? Even so, the author is not quite dead. It is true, as Paul Valéry pointed out, that many things are involved in the creation of a work of art besides an author; but this is to demote authors rather than to annihilate them. ‘What does it matter who is speaking?’ Michel Foucault famously scoffed. In real life, it ...”

“... This is no exaggeration. Simply a statement of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David ...”

“... Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers Paul Read similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The service is conducted by Father Kit Cunningham who talks about Anna, saying how she had summoned him ...”

“... it all sounded just fine’, and settled down to raise a family. Ralph (b. 1970) was followed by Paul (b. 1973) and Clarissa (b. 1975). After Ralph’s death, Frank’s dreaminess began to manifest itself in various ways. In the two years between the death and his divorce, he explains, ‘I must’ve slept with 18 different women – a number I don’t ...”

“... and the ‘autographic sequel’, which is not an imitation but a prolongation – like Walter Scott’s or James Fenimore Cooper’s novel cycles, or Balzac’s Human Comedy. Both types are tied to market forces. Collections like To Be Continued: An Annotated Guide to Sequels (1995) and The Whole Story: 3000 Years of Sequels and Sequences (1996) attest to ...”

“... So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as someone else. The whole world expands and changes in ‘Cass and Me’ when, as a boy, he climbs on the older Cass’s shoulders, and they lean out                across the yard As a giant would across the world ...”

“... revolted by that book, and American intellectuals have never put him beside Faulkner, Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald. And on the Continent there is no translation of Waugh as audacious as Avanti Jeeves. And yet even those who praise him nearly always begin by dissociating themselves from what they regard as his bigotry, his snobbery, his cruelty, his ...”

“... had for so long been reading about. The French made a nuisance of themselves by following Walter Scott in the street, demanding to be allowed to draw him. But they were disappointed by British art, and of the modern buildings Defauconpret could only mutter: ‘des briques, des briques et toujours des briques.’ The Germans, however, were noted for being ...”