“... critics – which animates not literary theory in general but the reigning usurpers. It is then a short step to the abolition of much else. Hartman speaks with level derangement of the ‘illusion that genius exists.’ No, he doesn’t mean the illusion that there are geniuses around now, he means what he blankly says: the illusion that there is such a thing ...”

“... semi-abstract, reflecting the music within. In the green-washed photo on the back, Eno has notably short hair and is reading a book. Not something you’d see on the covers of many rock albums of the time. Another Green World is the opposite of prog, although it features various prog-adjacent musicians, whose contributions Eno applies like dabs of ...”

“... need for a Big idea. On her first official visit to Harrow after their marriage, she delivered a short speech to Mosley’s constituents thanking them for their wedding present. ‘Saying just the right thing in the right way,’ the Constituency President wrote to her husband, ‘she gripped ... the heart of her audience at once.’ Mosley was interested in ...”

“... its big names too: Paul Mason from Newsnight, Suzanne Moore from the Mail on Sunday, the novelist Philip Hensher. Some people refuse to stand on an IoI platform, considering them clandestine and creepy. Others are a bit doubtful, but take part in the events in the interests of free debate. Others again want the exposure and don’t care about the IoI’s ...”

“... of privilege.’ We have heard this credo from Cisneros, and we hear it, via McGurl, from Philip Roth:It ‘did not dawn on’ [Roth] that the ‘anecdotes and observations’ of his boyhood in lower-middle-class Newark with which he entertained his highbrow friends ‘might be made into literature’. Instead, the ‘stories I wrote, set absolutely ...”

“... Yeats, he must have been aware of the kind of criticism he would encounter. ‘At one stroke,’ Philip Larkin wrote, ‘he lost his key subject and emotion – Europe and the fear of war – and abandoned his audience together with their common dialect and concerns.’ Responding to Auden’s death in 1973, Anthony Powell was less circumspect: ‘No more ...”

“... of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to answer. For those not directly affected, the acceptable form of exculpation and remembrance involves obliterating any consideration of dead Afghans and folding the British war dead into a single mass of noble ...”

“... all Southern Baptists. He let his wife take the girls to the local Presbyterian Church, which fell short of the full Baptist obsession with an angry God, but Averette insisted that Joe and his brothers join him on Sunday mornings in Fairmont’s First Baptist Church, which made no secret of what it thought was important: we preach Jesus Christ crucified risen ...”

“... think worth while ‘What’s Become of Wystan?’ was the title of a sharp review by Philip Larkin, which began by imagining a pair of readers, one of the early Auden and one of the later, talking entirely at cross-purposes as ‘one spoke of a tremendously exciting English social poet full of energetic unliterary knockabout and unique lucidity ...”

“... no social democrat: he was the archetypal union boss with a big block vote for repartee. In short, the problem once more requires an understanding of Labour factionalism on different levels and some wariness in conflating them too readily. Crossman’s own position and viewpoint also become more comprehensible in these terms. He was, as has been ...”

“... for no reason at all; it appears in the structure at whim; it vanishes without further ado. In short, Messiaen’s method never manages to fit in with his discourse, because he does not compose – he juxtaposes.’ ‘When he first entered class, he was very nice,’ Messiaen recalled of Boulez. ‘But he soon became angry with the whole world … Even if ...”

“... In Corso’s hutch, his minders begged for copies of Barbara Pym, while Gregory spoke wistfully of Philip Larkin. Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I ...”

“... Russia in 1926 (the first English translation was published in 1929). The cycle comprises 33 very short stories based on Babel’s experiences working for the Red Cavalryman, the newspaper of the Cossack army, during the Russo-Polish War of 1920. The Cossacks in the stories are superhuman figures, and not always well disposed towards the likes of Babel, a ...”

“... Mitchell’s mind Byatt belongs to that category of writers ‘who achieve virtuosity in both short and long-form fiction’. She began with the novel – the too-traditional novel – in her undergraduate days at Cambridge, eking it out ‘very obsessively and very slowly, knowing it was no good’, yet knowing she couldn’t write anything else. This ...”

“... done too badly. He had kept the service moving and each contribution brief: he had not sold God short and even allowing for the saxophone solo and the old lady currently in full, if tiny, voice it had never ceased to be a church service. Treacher had come along hoping to find Father Jolliffe a bit of a clown and over-anxious to please. There had been no ...”