“... have a memory of sitting there and feeling smug,’ she wrote of attending a class taught by John Crowe Ransom in 1938. She identified as a Trotskyite, placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning ...”

“... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...”

“... Five. By the early 1950s, I was tearing at speed through the middlebrow bestsellers of the time: John Creasey, Nevil Shute, the wartime adventures of British officers who’d escaped, or tried to escape, from German POW camps, like The Wooden Horse and The Colditz Story, along with a stream of books about fishing. The nearest I came to reading ...”

“... Talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully, on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. This is a God’s-eye view of the history of literature: Chaucer conversing with Dante, Shakespeare with Marlowe, Herbert with Donne, Austen with Thackeray, the Brownings with each other – and ...”

“... The text does not, alas, teach how to avoid being beheaded by a king.It wasn’t until 1744 that John Newbery published what is generally thought to be the first children’s book: A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly … The Use of which will infallibly make Tommy a good ...”

“... books under review belong to very different genres, both of which are relevant to this task – John Willett’s a critical and historical study based on many years as reviewer, English editor and translator of Brecht, Ronald Hayman’s a lively, detailed biography – though the first turns out to be far the more expert, original and ...”

“... Everyone was connected, one way or another. Three of Albertina’s brothers – Jimmy, Francis and John – joined the occupation, along with their uncle, Eddie. ‘It was like no other department in Cammell Laird’s,’ Albertina says. ‘Because it was all younger lads. And it was full of comedians. It was a joy to go into work. You’d rather go into work ...”

“... and teachers. Not since the publication of the central texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great ...”

“... agrees that she was and remains a brilliant natural performer. Whether speaking to a crowded hall or to a single voter on a doorstep or to her fellow pundits in a television studio, she is in her element. It is not just that she is fluent, vivid and engaging: she speaks in a way that erases distance, transforming audience and speaker into a common ...”

“... storeys up, a captain in a smart grey wool coat sat behind a big desk in a corner office watching John Travolta in Be Cool. At least he had turned up for work; much of the Libyan police force now exists only on paper. A colonel in the internal intelligence service told me that he, and every other high-ranking officer he knows, shows up once a week to pick up ...”

“... does occur; they hear his call, which leaves the air on the ‘dark stair’ and in the ‘empty hall’ of the ‘lone house’ ‘stirred and shaken’, while their failure to answer is experienced by the Traveller as a response in itself: ‘And he felt in his heart their strangeness,/Their stillness answering his cry.’ The parting command that he ...”

“... wilderness renamed is still a wilderness,’ writes Lawson-Peebles in apparent agreement with John Quincy Adams and Joseph Hall, both of whom had scorned the ‘edenic’ fables told about the West. But is it? Yes, in the sense that you can still starve or freeze or get eaten in it. But we’re talking about writing and ...”

“... No Enemies of Promise here as for his half-hated friend Connolly. If Waugh had seen a pram in his hall, he would probably have been mortified; his reaction as a writer when his wife had babies was to go away and put up in a hotel where he could write in peace. Many novelists, like Anthony Powell, found that they could not get down to work while hostilities ...”

“... by Cape in 1980, and then by Penguin and Vintage, except with a new, enthusiastic introduction by John Banville and a useful short bibliography. Bowen is one of those rare writers who is equally good at novels and short stories; in fact, because her novels are short, densely written, formally deliberate, it’s not easy to particularise any difference between ...”

“... di People’s Election Special rolling off a thirty-year-old Heidelberg printing machine at the John Love Press, a small works where the centre-spread of an eight-page edition was already flouncing onto the delivery table. (This little engine-room of populist exasperation was another non-Kaplan place.) Paul Kamara, one of the paper’s editors, drove down a ...”