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“... Draper and Noel Coward. Thus no modern writer can have taken more literally the injunction to ‘read out loud the sentence you have just written’ – except that Keillor has spoken not just an individual sentence or two but the whole story plus a raft of variations tried out over the years. His writings consequently have not merely their own particular ...”

“... he/she gets prompter acceptance and payment for a review than for a poem or a story. We have all read about how the essay is itself an honourable genre (obeisances to Michel de Montaigne), and most of us by now know that there is no fixed frontier between literature and journalism: all the same, some writing is designedly ephemeral whereas some isn’t, and ...”

“... Anne Maclean, two lecturers in philosophy at the University College of Swansea, when they first read the dissertation in 1989. They reckoned that half of it had been copied out of books. Yet, they discovered to their horror, the lucky student had got his MA without a viva or a word of criticism. Something was plainly wrong in the university’s Centre for ...”

“... a great many of the virtues that make the golden-age detective story still one of the most widely read literary forms. They have their share of cosiness, with menace lurking underneath; they exploit class-consciousness – humorously, with none of that deadening Thirties snobbery; they use traditional humours, and gently mock traditional humours, and gently ...”

“... with something more like anger than resignation. The counter-irritant that came into my mind as I read was Hal Summers’s requiem for his cat: he would not pretend That what came was a friend But met it in pure hate, Well died, my old cat. The Zorzas had had time to prepare, and Parkes writes that those who do tend to be better survivors. Leach and his ...”

“... is a transsexual, but the suggestion is that she wants to conform to society and can’t, just as Peter Pan, as Barrie finally admitted to himself, wanted to grow up, but couldn’t. Women are treated in The Well without much sympathy, and almost always as empty-headed. The whole book supports the view that men are naturally superior, which is why Stephen ...”

“... abbreviated to 40 for Empty Words. Even that, though, is excessive. One does not, of course, read the text that Cage has contrived, so much as simply acknowledge it. Once we have recognised the premise, we have done all that was necessary. The words themselves, potent with meaning in Joyce, have been robbed of their force by the rote-efficiency of the ...”

“... includes open spaces, small spaces, avocados, tall escalators, flying, social kissing and the Blue Peter theme music. But reviewing Christopher’s List of Behavioural Problems, I decided he’d probably be even worse to live with than I am (Christopher, among other things, likes not to talk to people for a long time, not to eat or drink anything for a long ...”

“... out about the types and processes of metamorphosis that were described in the tradition and to read them in order to throw light on changing ideas about persons and personhood.’ It is a vast subject (what work of art or literature doesn’t have something to say about metamorphosis?) but also an elusive one, as Warner is well aware, comparing herself to ...”

“... been deceived into by undercover officers. Many more would follow.In 2013, one former SDS officer, Peter Francis, spoke publicly about the unit’s role in spying on the family of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager murdered by a gang of white youths in 1993, a fact that had not been disclosed to the Macpherson Inquiry into the police failure to properly ...”

“... The MI5 officer quickly dispensed with the Wilson Government – its penetration was taken as read – slandered Wilson’s own loyalties and those of several members of his Cabinet, and then moved on to the Royal family. The thrust of his accusations was that Mountbatten, ‘a dodgy character’, had managed to slip onto the staff at Buckingham Palace a ...”

“... I have not met Max Wright, but a few years ago I read two chapters of a book he was writing about the Plymouth Brethren. I thought highly of the script and looked forward to hearing how it was getting on. Now I have the finished work. Told in Gath is published in the streets of Askelon and the daughters of the Philistines rejoice (2 Samuel 1 ...”

“... prose on altruism. In these lines from The Taming of the Shrew, Preposterous ass! that never read so far To know the cause why music was ordained! Shakespeare isn’t saying anything at all; and Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopp’d, Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is is not really an aphorism but a sententia – a Senecan sentence, in ...”

“... of ‘political thought’ would have to consist of several volumes (how many?) designed to be read concurrently. Within the Latin ecumene, the problem of selection does not disappear. Professor Burns indicates his awareness that ‘the history of political thought’ in this era could have been written as consisting of a number of ‘interrelated but ...”

“... fables were seen as an effective means of communicating Protestant morality. Yet Aesop wasn’t read by children in antiquity. Despite the fables’ anthropomorphised animals and childlike air, the mise en scène was usually imagined to be political. A man possessed of immense power is about to take an important decision; meanwhile, an underling, feeling ...”