“... and ‘the smell of hay still opens a path to the farthest and fondest places in me.’To read Heaney’s memories of his early life is to find not only rural, familial experience (hauling sacks of grain, buying eggs from ‘the egg man’ and the like) but rural and local words: ‘A “groop” [was] a sunk trench in the concrete floor … to drain ...”

“... proceeds: ‘I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are ...”

“... Thus, his reading experience is closer to that of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, who also read the plays in what was, for them, a modern form. We plan both a new single-volume edition of Shakespeare’s works for the Oxford Standard Authors (OSA) series, and a detailed scholarly edition, devoting a volume to each play, for the Oxford English Texts ...”

“... is uncharacteristic, a flicker of hesitation such as Leavis does not usually allow himself. Read the chapter on Hard Times and you discover why he loved this, the most tendentious and merely emblematic of all Dickens’s novels. He dwells at length on the practice of Gradgrind in the classroom and the dire consequences of his supposedly utilitarian ...”

“... on the first part of this passage ran: ‘This seems to me rather good, considering I had not read a syllable of any book on the subject, but had thought it all out for myself – beyond having just heard that there was a Greatest Happiness Principle, and having wondered why anything so obvious was called a principle, or how any one could dispute it – I ...”

“... I see an old film on the TV screen I look up his entries on the director and stars; I have thus read many of those profiles dozens of times without wearying of them. If I were not indulged in my choice of ‘luxury item’, then Thomson would be my consolation for having no access to films. I am saying, then, that Thomson’s criticism is both highly ...”

“... on page 7 of Lykiard’s Introduction). Did Ducasse choose the pseudonym? He had certainly read Sue, and Caradec emphasises the appeal of Latréaumont the character (‘a kind of cruel clown, a moral and physical monstrosity’) to the creator of the ‘diabolical’ Maldoror. Or was the name proposed by Lacroix, Sue’s publisher as well as ...”

“... Maeve and Deirdre – were around the same age, were cordial but not close. Maeve learned to read at the age of three and spent her childhood buried in books and writing in her diary – the traditional refuges of imaginative, incompletely happy children. She was good-natured, independent, wilful and precocious – a source of pride to her parents and of ...”

“... but it was a voice which an actor would have envied, as you noticed as soon as he started to read poetry aloud. It was deep but capable of great variety in its modulation. It has always struck me that the argument of his essay on the audible reading of poetry is a little weakened by the fact that he could read poetry ...”

“... man who became her second husband, John McHale, she was largely forgotten in Britain. The sculptor Richard Smith, and McHale himself, suffered similar neglect after leaving the UK.By the time I visited her, Cordell’s memories of the 1950s were patchy. For long stretches we said little. She smoked Carlton 100s and showed me a few collages by McHale that she ...”

“... and the Attlee Government, lost their places on the National Executive to Harold Wilson and Richard Crossman, the candidates of the Left. Dalton sulked, but Morrison made a shrewd and emollient speech against self-gratifying Conference resolutions which failed to impress working-class voters. Crossman himself was booed for confessing his intention to ...”

“... odd little book is eventually going to turn into a mock-judicial arraignment of the great lover. Richard Aldington (The Romance of Casanova) likewise adopts a God’s eye-view, makes Balbi a lay figure called Marco and invents a barmy alternative outcome whereby Casanova is recaptured and brainwashed. Sabatini, who as a gifted linguist could have worked ...”

“... stones’ is both the first and the last line of the poem. ‘The Duke’s Pagoda’ might be read as a companion-piece, or counterstatement, to Stevens’s ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, where the firmly accomplished placing of a simple artefact in the middle of a sprawling landscape has the power to fix an order upon it. The Duke’s vision is ...”

“... there are mistakes. The British diplomat kidnapped by the Quebec separatists was James Cross, not Richard Gross. The man sitting between Yassir Arafat and George Habash at the Tripoli Arab Summit Conference in 1977 was Zuhair Mohsin of SAIQA – not, as Claire Sterling suggests, Ahmed Jibril of the PFLP, to whom she devotes an entire chapter. The fate of her ...”

“... for Helen Smith, a 23-year-old nurse from Yorkshire who worked in the same private hospital as Richard Arnot, a surgeon. What actually occurred at the party is still the subject of dispute, and is related to a pending legal action. But everyone knows what happened afterwards. The following morning Helen Smith’s body was lying in a courtyard beneath the ...”