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“... and Todorov himself. A substantive collection that is not similarly guilty of sexism is Peter Caws’s issue of Social Research entitled ‘Current French Philosophy’.* In addition to exemplary essays such as Sarah Kofman’s on Kant and respect for women, it contains a representative deconstruction by Derrida of the philosophical notion of ...”

“... time at the Trafalgar Studios. I saw the first production at Wyndham’s in 1964 with Madge Ryan, Peter Vaughan and Dudley Sutton. Good in the part Sutton was already too old, as have been most of the actors who’ve played in it since. It’s a play I would dearly like to have written, though these days for it to retain its shock value the young man should ...”

“... in archives and indexed and endlessly examined. His works were meticulously edited by the late Peter Davison. This creates a big problem for his biographers. There’s just too much life. No biographer wants to be the one who fails to mention, say, that Orwell in Spain, ‘having passed the train journey up from the front gorging himself on ...”

“... Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly from work, Ben’s outspoken and eccentric personality is news to me, with both his sons saying how lucky they felt ...”

“... more by the designer on his first visit in July 1957 (he had pictured the site by knowledgeably reading marine charts). ‘He’s our Gary Cooper!’ a Sydney matron gushed on sighting the tall, blond, blue-eyed Dane and hearing his exotic, Norse-tinged English, a change from the somewhat harsh local accent. Although his idea was little more than a ...”

“... The Olivier chapters in Carey’s novel are cleverly and consistently crafted, but I found while reading them that I was mentally turning the pages, impatient to get back to Parrot. Parrot and Olivier in America is much preoccupied with the subject of freedom. Prisons and imprisonment crop up all over the novel and inform its imagery. The question of what it ...”

“... his act may look dull and formulaic: he simply got uppity with a luckless straight man called Peter Brough and showered him with childish insults. But he was able to bring on a troop of co-stars – Max Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie ...”

“... farming’. The horrors they witness will come as little surprise to anyone who has read Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Felicity Lawrence, Eric Schlosser or any of the previous exposés of factory-farmed meat, but they make grim and startling reading even so. If you can get beyond the title, the great virtues of ...”

“... Sagar’s magnum opus, Literature and the Crime against Nature, heavily indebted to his long reading in Hughes, was apparently rejected 72 times (it was finally published by Chaucer Press in 2005). But then what would you expect? ‘Manchester is advertising for a chair in Critical Theory,’ Sagar reports to Hughes disdainfully. ‘They are all ...”

“... 28 January 2005. Fly to Rome for a British Council reading. It occurs to me that a lot of the camp has gone out of British Airways and that as the stewards have got older and less outrageous so the service has declined. This morning there is scarcely a smile, not to mention a joke, the whole flight smooth, crowded and utterly anonymous ...”

“... in Lowell himself, but simply makes a graffiti scribble across the simple mystery of Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Vermeer is the reverse of a king; his art the very opposite of Lowell’s credo that ‘the artist’s existence becomes his art.’ Vermeer’s pictures are endlessly mysterious and commonplace precisely because the artist is not in them, has ...”

“... of Mark Ravenhill, the creation myth of the contemporary British theatre. Over recent years that reading has been challenged by academics, critics and some theatre practitioners keen to question the play’s impact and legacy. They have argued for the rehabilitation of the supposedly moribund theatrical culture that preceded Look Back in Anger, proposed ...”

“... poetry was little read or appreciated. The links between Graham and the painters Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, Karl Weschke and Sven Berlin were forged by his understanding of their work: it was his dedication to art, rather than his own art, that impressed them. Hilton said he found Graham’s poems ‘too obscure’, provoking a remarkably ...”

“... I have since eaten many things in respectable restaurants with far more trepidation.Only from reading Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History did he learn that the eating of clay was a prehistoric habit, something that kept the stomach filled until the next kill of aurochs. When he met Toynbee, he mentioned his own experience of this primitive ...”

“... see past. McGann’s starting point is a belief, shared by Bernard Beatty in his essay collection Reading Byron, that the ‘poetic character’ of large swathes of Byron’s work – the non-comic material, much of it produced before his turn to the ottava rima stanza in 1817 – has been ‘obscured by Don Juan’s celebrity’, underestimated and ...”