“... Waugh, as his last stories reveal, could not do without his Ambrose Silks and Agatha Runcibles and Peter Pastmasters. But one must not press the analogy too far. Waugh did become interested in himself as a literary model – very much so – and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a masterpiece of self-portraiture, one of the very best in English fiction. Even so ...”

“... and his extensive espionage work on behalf of Robert Harley, Defoe was an indefatigable writer. Peter Earle, in the introduction to The World of Defoe (1976), confesses the alarm he experienced when ‘with the contract signed, I began to realise just what I had let myself in for ... To my horror I discovered that Defoe was probably the most prolific writer ...”

“... than justice to the spirit of Wittgenstein’s work, a welcome alternative view is provided by Peter Hacker’s new book, Wittgenstein’s Place in 20th-Century Analytic Philosophy. This was written as a synoptic essay to accompany the huge four-part Analytical Commentary on the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, which he began working on twenty years ago ...”

“... expansive sociopolitical presentation of the self was, perhaps, becoming more problematic. This reading offers a valuable foil to vulgar-Freudian formulations. It undercuts the ‘hydraulic’ image of the history of sex, read as the resultant of contrary pressures – the unconscious and the conscious, mind and flesh, emerging in cycles of yea-saying and ...”

“... and Exter, let alone such important directors of Russian descent as Pitoeff, Komisarjevsky, Peter Brook and Jacques Tati, all of which is surely relevant to the modern reader’s view of the subject. He also virtually omits the cabaret and the ‘Blue Blouse’ agitprop movement, though he gives a useful account of the latter’s successor, the TRAM ...”

“... uncomfortable chairs, hideous panelling, deep gloom and an ill-stuffed armchair with a clip-on reading lamp. Some of the older staff remembered the old gentleman. He was a strict employer, they told me, and so it seemed. Portraits of the couple convey a chilling disdain. I expect they were as jolly as crickets. Home to more serious business. Three large ...”

“... say anything about this place. Come you on back and live here, then you can talk. Back in Donegal, reading the papers and watching the Ulster News I feel a voyeur, a political tourist. It’s then, for whatever reason – self-disgust, self-consciousness, that guilty intermittent sense of whatever breathing down your neck – it’s then when you’re in ...”

“... language at the cost of its variety. Before this new translation by Ciaran Carson, perhaps only Peter Whigham, whose version was left unfinished at his death, managed to re-create in English the full orchestra of Dante’s tongues, his ‘strange locust-like phonetics’ (to borrow the extraordinary vocabulary of Osip Mandelstam’s ‘Conversation about ...”

“... to these emotions was one thing that made you a Puritan. We grasp this point more readily from reading Dent than from a dozen theological treatises of the period. The most spirited exchanges in The Plain Man’s Pathway are between Theologus and the caviller Antilegon. Theologus calls Antilegon an atheist, although not in the modern sense. ‘Atheist’ in ...”

“... book’s ideas took shape as Hoggart tried to win his evening-class students over to new ways of reading literature and to seeing advertising as something that could also be ‘read’. He was one of a large number of men and women who committed themselves to furthering the postwar expansion of secondary schooling and adult education and to the larger ...”

“... this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning. Walter Benjamin believed that works of literature secreted certain meanings ...”

“... One of the great pleasures of reading Tony Harrison is the sense of quick passage between worlds, the sudden switch from the local to the international and back. At one moment he immerses us in a Northern (or Midlands in my case) English worry about what happens to us socially when we drop our ‘h’s and pronounce our ‘u’s as in ‘wuss’ rather than as in (the Southern form of) ‘lustre’, the next he is wondering how to memorialise the dead of Hiroshima or the Gulf War ...”

“... good deal of undercover subtlety. Hart-Davis liked Walpole as a man, even found his works ‘easy reading’, but had few illusions as to Walpole’s standing as a writer; at a period when plain speaking was less allowable than today, he dealt openly with the exacting brand of homosexuality which drew Walpole towards middle-aged married men. Sympathy on the ...”

“... A few months before the publication of Dusklands in 1974, J.C. Kannemeyer reports, Peter Randall, the director of Ravan Press in Johannesburg, asked J.M. Coetzee to consider supplying ‘a few more personal details’ for the jacket of his first novel. ‘We are often criticised,’ Randall wrote, ‘for not telling readers about our authors ...”

“... in their Kingdom.’ Solitaries, Evelyn claimed, ‘have . . . no passions, save the sensual’. Reading these strictures, or the many other 17th-century jeremiads against solitude, Pepys would not have thought to apply them to his solitary sexual pleasures. It took another finger-wagging text to make the connection: Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self ...”