“... to cope with. The fact that he was so much brighter and more dedicated than the average publisher may have influenced people, but it probably did not make him many friends in the trade. Neither did his attitude to what might now fashionably be called ‘authors’ rights’. Traditional British publishers take – or, to give them the benefit of the ...”

“... is an answer to Chomsky’s question, it was not given at the Royaumont conference. Why not? It may be that Chomsky is right and that there is no answer. But there is another possibility which is never very clearly discussed in this book, and it centres on the difficulty of establishing any kind of causal hypothesis about children’s development. By and ...”

“... contemporary, and seeking in chronicle an inverted form of augury. Or, less apocalyptically, we may end up as minor entertainers in light prose. Should that happen, the High Puffer’s boast that it ‘more history books were written like this they would drive novels off the market’ will be put to the test. And on the evidence of this kind of ...”

“... everyone believed in fair shares for all. The loss of aristocratic power between the wars may have been the most important factor of all. In 1914 the structure of society was still astonishingly feudal, and Mr Turner speaks of regiments being raised by the nobility; Lord Derby, he says, caused ‘a storm in Labour circles when he announced that, after ...”

“... parts of the novels; the religions of India as Mother Revisited, in an acceptable version. It may seem odd that writers interested in the elimination of ego should write work that is relentlessly autobiographical. But this misses the point, in the sense that pure autobiography is really about somebody else, about someone who can be looked at in the same ...”

“... in that he writes poems only when he has to. It is those who fear (only too rightly) that they may not be real poets who keep up a large and uneven output. ‘Of course I’m a poet, haven’t I written a poem a day for the last ten years?’ Larkin has on more than one occasion voiced his fears about poetry becoming ‘official and subsidised’. In ...”

“... permanently. It gets no food from us and apparently none from anyone else. I am fearful that it may die on me. I should look foolish indeed with a dead cat on my hands and no idea who it belongs to. I have courteously conveyed the suggestion that it should go away. No luck so ...”

“... length and merged with the volume to come. What went on in Dostoevsky’s head during the 1850s we may guess largely from subsequent fiction: the fictionalised account of imprisonment in The House of the Dead, The Idiot’s speculation on what the last moments before execution must be like, Raskolnikov’s first encounter in Siberia with the New Testament. It ...”

“... endured an uphill struggle. His book has been fairly extensively rubbished in this country, which may not be wholly unconnected with the fact that Langguth is an American. For a Yank to invade this most English of territories was clearly an act of colossal cheek, and the bounder obviously deserved the wigging he got. But, actually, hang it all, you ...”

“... a means of communication between strangers. The traveller who gives his character to these novels may have come from the Eastern United States – as do Theroux himself and several of his narrators – but that isn’t important. This traveller brings next to nothing with him – none of the conventional assumptions or idiosyncrasies of the older generation ...”

“... careless (‘Lawrence has caricatured a characteristic group of cronies...’) The fictions may not go very deep, but memory inscribes its potency on every ...”

“... Tale, having disappeared to reappear in opera, reappears again in Hollywood in 1934. ‘It may be in their awareness of themselves,’ Cavell remarks at one point in his conversation, ‘their responsibility for themselves, that the films of remarriage most deeply declare, and earn, their allegiance to Shakespearian ...”

“... ourselves that there are other forms of discourse, and that they can be treated in other ways, we may turn to the Hungarian George Konrad. His earlier book The Case Worker has been highly praised, but I have not seen it. The City Builder, presented as fiction, is not a novel in any ordinary sense. It is not easily definable as anything else either: in ...”

“... he said. The product of a Birmingham grammar school, Barnes became not only a good but one may say a great Trinity mathematician, influencing and teaching Hardy and Littlewood, the outstanding British mathematicians of the first half of this century. A research Fellow of Trinity, who had no idea that Barnes was a Trinity man, let alone a bishop, said ...”

“... intellect-sensation’ types. The hive needs us all. We poets are like the despised drones. You may not like us, but we scatter our seed, and the Queens are fertilised. It is a passage that suggests both what the novel is about and how it is to work. It also gestures towards a couple of interesting dilemmas which the author is to explore but arguably ...”