“... Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, gave intellectuals and writers from once colonised nations (themselves often migrants, like Said) a language that liberated and shackled in almost equal measure. Said’s critical perspective gave both Europeans and non-Europeans a shrewder and more unillusioned sense of the subterranean ways in which power operated through the cultures of empire, and is now so familiar that it’s easily taken for granted ...”

“... now drawing to a close. Perhaps the symbolic moment came with the visit to South Africa of Senator Edward Kennedy at the invitation of Tutu and Boesak. Had things gone as in the old days, the latter would have been able to enhance their local position by basking in the charismatic shadow of such a glamorous symbol of Western liberal opinion. But at this point ...”

“... eight stories we discover that their perceptions are like those of the drowsy, the lonely, the young, the distressed, that feeling and suffering, strength of feeling and bodily weakness, are potently related. In other words, we discover that Chekhov is a romantic writer. No one could mistake ‘The Steppe’ for an example of Chekhov’s ...”

“... them is skilfully traced from the time when Owen was writing fully supportive references for the young Huxley, desirous of one of the few footholds in a poorly-paid scientific profession, to the time when Owen redesigned his dinosaurs to make sure they could not possibly fit Huxley’s phylogeny. Much of the fascination of Desmond’s story stems from the ...”

“... Israelis and to show that there were people with whom you could even organise a common front.’ Young, charismatic, friendly with Palestinians and the European left, the Matzpeniks shouted the anti-imperialist slogans heard in the streets of every modern metropolis except Tel Aviv, infuriating Israelis across the political spectrum. One right-wing ...”

“... elegant, his head held back a bit as he talked, as though you were a menu.’ From Light Years, a young girl smitten by love: ‘She could not eat, like a dog that has been sold.’ And there is another kind, the imagery of states of being. In The Hunters, he writes of disappointment: ‘There had been many ambitions … They were scattered behind him like ...”

“... books, collectors and readers. Every good secondhand bookshop offered guidance for neophytes: A. Edward Newton’s chatty books about his bookish adventures; Holbrook Jackson’s erudite Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into ...”

“... naive, serious-minded and completely innocent girl’, was besotted with a portrait of the young Maxim Gorky.Until the late 1930s the Veger family had a busy and pleasant life, visiting their dacha in the Silver Forest and going to meetings of the Moscow Linguistic Circle. But, like many members of the intelligentsia, they fell foul of Stalin’s ...”

“... with which her thoughtless parents encumbered her at birth. King has her married to a ‘young man called James Monaco’ and this mistake is symptomatic of a certain vagueness in his approach to the subject, in that he never manages to elucidate all the myths which the lady’s posturings so insistently encouraged. Yet such an attack is ...”

“... by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came to locate herself ...”

“... we knew her much better than we really did. John Lehmann, writing of his early meetings with the young Stephen Spender, described Spender as ‘the most rapidly self-revealing person I had ever met’. Something of the sort might be said about Stevie: but one was simultaneously aware of a great deal that was not revealed, and never would be. The public ...”

“... he becomes engrossed in electrical experiments and succeeds in turning his brother (‘Uncle Edward’) into the chime of the front-door bell. Other characters constantly appear and disappear, though in less radical fashion, throughout both books. They include the narrator’s ineffectual and inconsequential mother, the assistants in the store who are ...”

“... As well as a group of poets, the magazine also had some energetic and intelligent new critics: young hoods not afraid to wield an axe. It seemed to matter terribly that people didn’t get things wrong, that poetry – as we confidently understood it – didn’t get turned into something else: something flashier, more prosy, more glamorous, more ...”

“... devolution provoked demands for a legislature. Agitation within the Liberal Party, headed by the Young Scots Society, brought the prospect of a parliament in view in 1913, as part of a home-rule-all-round settlement. This vanished with the Liberals, to reappear with the Independent Labour Party. Even Ramsay MacDonald, in his National Government ...”

“... Which is getting closer, by the way. Shaking the memory of some of our experiences together as young writers at the University of East Anglia and in London might get you in the mood for what’s to come, not the stuff about the late-night tattoo sessions and the three-week hunt for Mr Hashish, the Afghan border guard who stole your US Army fatigue jacket ...”