“... the bread of daily experience into the host of sacred nourishment which he calls art. Flaubert and James, Proust and Joyce are adepts who immolate themselves on the altar of their own art, gathering profane experience into the artifice of eternity. For Leavis, the most precious novel is one which reflects a ‘reverent openness before Life’, and the ...”

“... the law. A second view, developed and prolifically publicised by a barrister journalist named William Finlason in the aftermath of the rising, was that martial law replaced all civil authority with the will of the military commander – subject only to what Finlason delphically called ‘natural justice’ or, as Disraeli later put it in the ...”

“... his material.Produced under Fascism in 1943, Visconti’s Ossessione (an unauthorised version of James M. Cain’s hardboiled novel The Postman Always Rings Twice) is generally considered the first Neorealist film, but it was Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), the first movie made after the war to represent the recent Italian past, that planted the ...”

“... known as King Philip’s War, Reverend Hope Atherton was the chaplain accompanying Captain William Turner’s militia on their march to an Algonquian encampment near Deerfield, Massachusetts in the Connecticut River Valley. There they ambushed the sleeping tribe, slaughtered some of them and drove others into the river, which swept them over the ...”

“... its demolition in 1941 was a disgrace.Augusta Persse was born in 1852, and in 1880 she married Sir William Gregory, who was 35 years older than her. He died in 1892, and she outlived him by forty years. Lady Gregory made herself useful to Yeats, as Roy Foster shows in his biography of the poet, because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area ...”

“... biographical writing about Orwell, including the memoir of Richard Rees and The Unknown Orwell by William Abrahams and Peter Stansky (lamed by the late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later ...”

“... what happens next. This episode is very funny in its grossness, a sort of realist version of William Burroughs’s talking arsehole routine. But it is also, like the talking arsehole routine, much more than merely funny. As I have said already, one of the most exciting things about Welsh’s book is the way it draws you right inside a community of people ...”

“... A hundred and fifty years ago William Thackeray observed – after a trawl through London bookstalls – that middle-class litterateurs like himself knew (and cared) less about working-class literature than about Lapland. In a much quoted essay twenty years later, Wilkie Collins, after a similar expedition, coined the phrase ‘the Unknown Public ...”

“... early positivist description of the mind in terms of mental states. (A footnote of Sir William Hamilton, 1837: ‘The term State has, more especially of late years, and principally by Necessitarian philosophers, been applied to all modifications of mind, indifferently.’) I admire the directness of dumping the mind and proceeding to what Patricia ...”

“... attractively collectable format as a celebration of Hay’s native place – Tarbert, Loch Fyne. William McIlvanney, an accomplished novelist, is another Scottish writer who has a strong sense of where he comes from. He wants to reveal in his poems ‘the streets outside where Scotland really lives’. Unfortunately, though, McIlvanney can’t spot a ...”

“... who try to impose global solutions should remember,’ he writes, ‘the words of the poet William Blake, “One Law for the Lion and Ox is Tyranny”.’ To scientists, Dyson may be best known for his work in physics shortly after World War Two. Many equations in quantum field theory were producing meaningless, infinite figures. Dyson helped, if not ...”

“... held the attention – the text of the man, not of his art. As the writer and war correspondent William Walton said to Denis Brian, ‘a man who has spent all his life inventing fiction keeps on inventing it in his private life.’ The reaction started with the publication of Death in the Afternoon in 1932, the hero of which, as Kenneth Lynn cogently ...”

“... line of contact between several of these figures: four of them were the subjects of biographies by James Boaden (1762-1839), who happened also to edit Garrick’s letters. Ms Kelly mentions these lives in her preface, and one might almost suppose that the spur for writing this book came to her from the arrival of a hoard of Boaden volumes from a relative’s ...”

“... haunts the books under review. A fact is what won’t go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test our loyalty to it, it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth. Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar looks at the sky, his lawn, the ...”

“... the rivalries of race, region and class, pronunciation is obviously important, and grammar too, as William Labov has effectively shown in his studies of Black English: but the most visible differentiations are borne by idiom and vocabulary. What you call things raises you up, puts you down, or sets you just where you choose to be. (When I was a boy, we called ...”