“... from Frances Sheridan, William Chaigneau and Thomas Amory to create a readership for these novels. Ian Campbell Ross’s superbly informative introduction to ‘Fiction to 1800’ creates a persuasive argument for a political relevance and a coherent tradition in the early Irish novel. Ross includes an excerpt from Tristram Shandy, less on the basis of ...”

“... thin puce belfries’ of the Third. Guided by the producer Douglas Cleverdon, Under Milk Wood and Beckett’s All That Fall came into being; and drama thrived – the careers of N.F. Simpson, Pinter and Stoppard were nurtured there. Desmond Shawe-Taylor wrote in the New Statesman that ‘the whole musical landscape’ was ‘likely to be transformed ...”

“... the theatrical sense: he did his degree in drama). In between, in 1987, he’d published Norwegian Wood, which sold two million copies in Japan. These books were obviously fun, and eerily recognisable (someone wittily rechristened the first ‘The Big Sheep’). For the young Murakami, who used to like to tell people that his vocation as a novelist came to him ...”

“... Still, there was scope for narrative and adventure. They had each other, and like babes in the wood, they were given titbits to eat by their Irish tenants, who felt sorry for them. Like children in an Arthur Ransome or C.S. Lewis novel, they rambled unnoticed around the great house and were given to taking off on their bicycles up the main road to the ...”

“... Blackwood, 38 at the time and the mother of three daughters. Blackwood told Lowell’s biographer, Ian Hamilton, that after the party Lowell moved into her London house – ‘I mean instantly, that night.’On 27 April, three days before the party, Lowell had written to Hardwick: ‘I miss you both every minute. I may telephone for you to come and get ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to understand his ...”

“... and fell into the middle of the room with me underneath it. I knew the face framed by that rickety wood. I’d seen it before, in that frame, and I knew who it was: my grandfather Michael. I knew that’s who it was though I’d never met him. The grandfather was covered in dust and damp patches dried in. But that was him: he had the darkest eyes I’d ever ...”

“... Her Friends, in which she observed that her subject would always be an outsider. Twenty years ago Ian Hamilton wrote that Mew’s reputation ‘hangs by a thread’. Her Collected Poems and Prose has long been out of print and there are no critical books devoted to her writing.I’m not sure she would have minded. Reading essays that seek to rehabilitate or ...”

“... senses, and again I feel a sense of a great waste in my life. We must go again up that road to the wood where we found the scarlet toadstool and listen to the wind in the trees. I’m sure it’s beautiful at this time of year. Here the moon is large and lemon-yellow and drifts up into the sky at night like a hollow phosphorescent fungoid growth. Do you watch ...”

“... A chapter of Backroom Boys tracks the process by which two Cambridge students, David Braben and Ian Bell, used elegant mathematical fixes to get round the limited memory available on home computers in the early 1980s while writing an epoch-making computer game, Elite: Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or steel girders, building something is a ...”

“... Berlin described him as ‘disarmingly innocent’; but not everyone was disarmed. Ian Hamilton – whom Spender called ‘a professional hatchet man’ – once wrote a peppery though not wholly unsympathetic piece for the New Yorker in which he diagnosed in Spender a wily habit of getting in first to name his shortcomings so as to disarm the ...”

“... described by the selector-cataloguers of his panoramic exhibition at the Tate, Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, as ‘for later generations the very epitome of Romantic landscape painting’. It was the most derelict, most desolate scene Constable ever pictured, with its ruined pair of towers set beside an endless flat expanse of land and sea and ...”

“... for thirty years or more. Thus it was that the hard-headed Scottish-American business tycoon Ian MacGregor was appointed to sort out British Steel, and sort it out he did: after a doomed 13-week strike, the men accepted new manning procedures which in plants such as Port Talbot raised productivity overnight by far more than had been achieved in a decade ...”

“... It is, however, represented in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (edited in 1968 by Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell) by a single enticing paragraph from a 1940 review of Max Miller at the Holborn Empire, attached as a footnote to ‘The Art of Donald McGill’. The same four-volume collection contains 20 pieces Orwell contributed to ...”

“... be found ‘on the shelves of dons, the superior type of schoolmaster (the other type has Kipling, Ian Hay and P.G. Wodehouse), and in the average well-to-do home’. Initial reviews of Personal Pleasures – ‘most amusing’, ‘delightful’, ‘an ideal bedside book’ – were along these lines, calculated to please a publisher but suggesting something ...”