“... lived a far more public life than most Oxford dons do. So successful was he in this respect that, no doubt to his own pleasure, he was probably not often popularly thought of as an Oxford don. The media have their own not very likeable stereotype of the Oxford don, and Alan clearly didn’t fit that (though, to be fair, Oxford is full of people who do). So he ...”

“... work tearing off the adhesive strips or bringing the numbers to light with the aid of a coin edge. No such task presented itself. Instead a 4000-word letter from Mr John MacArthur introduced me to the world of plate-collecting. Eight million platers can’t be wrong and 450,000 joined the ranks in 1983 alone. Many of them ...”

“... bureaucratically-controlled London Transport to the new, elected Greater London Council. There was no complaint from the Conservative Party. Its two transport frontbenchers in the Commons, up-and-coming young hopefuls called Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine, welcomed the transfer, and specifically stated that this would enable the Council, if it felt ...”

“... in a protected zone in the midst of the sea which covers the land. But once he thinks ‘there are no such things as unicorns’, the water bursts through. By the end of the poem, he has returned to his usual way of life, and the status of his experience of the Flood is indeterminate: was it vision or delusion? The poem’s echoes of the Bible and of medieval ...”

“... book too. It has been widely labelled as a semi-autobiographical novel, though in fact there is no such thing. And one reviewer comments approvingly that Esther Freud writes about what she knows; well, let us hope we all do that. Over these disadvantages Hideous Kinky quickly triumphed. It is an impressive performance and not only as a first novel. As a ...”

“... had one child, a daughter. So he’s a curious – you could almost say implausible – mix of John McCain and Bill Clinton, though a few decades younger than either of them. According to the conventions of stories about fictional presidents, the novel strives to maintain the appearance of bipartisanship; Duncan never tells us which party he belongs ...”

“... her first and second novels, she was asked if she knew the difference between right and wrong. ‘No. Nothing is ever black or white to me, at all.’ After which Dunn asks: ‘But do you have any kind of definite moral code? Like for instance you shouldn’t sleep with married men?’ ‘Not at all, no,’ Quin ...”

“... It is​ no surprise that Irish studies has become something of a heavy industry in academia. Ireland is a small nation – ‘an afterthought of Europe’, as James Joyce put it – and marginality is much in vogue at the moment. Yet it is also home to a magnificent body of literature, much of it written with wonderful convenience in the world’s premier language, and so easily accessible from Tokyo to Bogotá ...”

“... precedence. ‘His Lordship affected more aristocracy than befitted his years or the occasion,’ John Galt thought, and Hazlitt agreed: ‘He may affect the principles of equality, but he resumes his privilege of peerage, upon occasion.’ Gilmour is nearer the mark to see in Byron’s touchiness and bumptiousness not the toff reverting to type, but rather a ...”

“... While her relationship to this material appears to be strictly intellectual – she mentions no shopping excursions of her own, only the pleasure of ‘dozens of cups of tea’ while she scoured the extensive archives at Selfridges – she has written a fascinating as well as an erudite book. Victorian London was divided by gender as well as by ...”

“... Carrie Kipling, once arrived at their house in Sussex to find Rudyard in a sweat in front of the hall fireplace shovelling a pile of his manuscripts into the flames. It was a horrifying sight, especially to a publisher. ‘For heaven’s sake, Rud, what are you doing?’ Doubleday asked. To which the answer came: ‘I was looking over old papers and I got ...”

“... initiating the chapter of uncertainty that coincided with his first letters to Stephen Bann. At no stage in Finlay’s career, however, were the turmoil of the artist and the peace of art necessarily incompatible. As one of his most cited bons mots puts it, a garden is not a retreat but an attack, and the green thoughts he thinks in his version of pastoral ...”

“... creating a subliminal urge to wash the hands that have been in contact with it. This is an effect no ebook can hope to duplicate. The blurb of Sweet Tooth amplifies the clear genre signals of intrigue and danger sent by the cover image (the back panel shows the same corridor, with the man in a slightly more neutral pose, though the woman has disappeared), and ...”

“... Portraits of Adonis (bronze head of Sargon from Akkad 2500-2000 BC to Denis Rodman c.1998 – no, I don’t know who he is either). In the pages that followed, Eco found an array of pictures to please, excite and rest the eye, and gave a fairly elementary run through of aesthetic theory, chronicling the changing assumptions about what has constituted the ...”

“... and the young and depraved pauper ‘Kay’ – even found themselves propelled onto the music hall stage or living a ghostly afterlife in fiction and verse. Traces of Greenwood’s prose and characters can still be heard in Orwell’s ‘down and out’ accounts, written more than fifty years later. What gave ‘A Night in a Workhouse’ this power? What ...”