“... writerly cellar the feet of passers-by, hear the rapping of their heels. Much of the pleasure of reading Flights comes from the essay clusters embedded between sections of narrative, and there’s no shortage of first-person writing here, but little autobiography in conventional terms: ‘My abdominal aorta is normal. My bladder works. Haemoglobin ...”

“... out in her excellent Editing Emily Dickinson (2008), to edit Dickinson is to offer a critical reading that is inevitably shaped by the preoccupations of the time; no doubt Susan Howe’s declaration in The Birth-mark (1993) that Dickinson’s ‘manuscripts should be understood as visual productions’ will at some point in the future seem as wholly of ...”

“... by press photographers. In school, he did well in science but was bored by most of the assigned reading, and his prospects for college were sunk by a cumulative average of 67. The disappointment mattered less than it might have done: by his senior year, Kubrick had begun placing photographs in Look magazine. A regular position there would support him over ...”

“... work of Flannery O’Connor than Amis did: ‘The day didn’t get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by “Flannery O’Connor” in the bath … horribly depressing American South things.’ This is October 1967. I can’t see how Flannery O’Connor (which he perhaps thought was a pen name) could be so easily dismissed by someone ...”

“... well-known personalities from history, like Robespierre or Thomas Cromwell). You might start reading Bedford for the food and the celebrity gossip, but you reread for the thrilling materiality, ‘concrete and fastidious’, as she herself once suggested, of her prose: odd, elaborate framings and risky hanging slabs of dialogue; locutions that started ...”

“... put all that fornication and eloquent embroidery to industrious use. His two favourite pastimes, reading Protestant theologians and periscoping other men’s wives, huddled under one roof in his breakthrough novel, Couples (1968), the book that boosted Updike into the major leagues of bestsellerdom and landed him on the cover of Time, his ...”

“... Go away a little closer, Idiot Boy. I’ve got all the recent books on the subject. But reading books – and there have been droves over the past decade – seems only to deepen the confusion. Witness Create, a glossy catalogue published to coincide with a major show of Outsider Art at the Berkeley Art Museum this spring. However beautifully put ...”

“... the best succinct introduction to the poetry is Joseph Brodsky’s extraordinary close reading of one poem, ‘A New Year’s Greeting’, which appeared first in Russian and was then translated for his book of essays Less Than One (1986). Entitled with deceptive modesty ‘Footnote to a Poem’, this is an introduction not only to Tsvetaeva’s ...”

“... you ever didn’t want to know about Brando is available in this rambling, ghosted tale. Reading it is like waking up in the morning next to last night’s dream lover and realising you brought the bar-room bore home with you. The trick is to go back to their place and leave before they wake. Songs My Mother Taught Me is the breakfast too far. But ...”

“... gone for some time.’ Roth’s titles have often teased with implied offers of frank confession: Reading Myself and Others. The Ghost Writer, ‘My True Story’, etc. In the preface to the last Peter Tarnopol solemnly announced that something truer than true was on its way: ‘Presently Mr Tarnopol is preparing to forsake ...”

“... on how a French-speaking Dakar sentry would challenge a stranger. At one point, in her role as Mrs Peter Rodd, she writes to her absentee husband to dissuade him from suing Waugh for libel, telling him that this is the lowest way of making money. Waugh, of course, has no scruples about picking up libel damages, looking on the Daily Express as a milch ...”

“... and Jack Adams, Convenor at BL, Longbridge; not only Martin Jacques, editor of Marxism Today, but Peter Carter, UCATT regional organiser; not only Royden Harrison, professor of social history at Warwick, but Jack Jones and Stan Newens MP; not only Robin Blackburn of New Left Review but Mike le Cornu, shop steward at Heathrow. They all, with remarkably few ...”

“... of Lisa. Thomas has said that, after he had envisaged the earlier part of the novel, it was on reading Kuznetsov’s Babi-Yar that the shape of The White Hotel offered itself: he knew Lisa would end up there. But why was it so obvious? The bold Eros/Thanatos diagram Thomas is intent on constructing is achieved at the expense of the sympathetic realism of ...”

“... the vulgarisation of Christianity, is a barn-door that has been riddled repeatedly by the likes of Peter Simple. The influence of Evelyn Waugh – the Waugh of Decline and Fall – is so marked as to be oppressive. The characters are facetiously named – Father Sporran, the Dundee of Caik, Professor Hairbrush (a philosopher – get it?). Since satire invites ...”