“... but pleasing, somehow, to me. I was nudged in his direction by my graduate supervisor at Oxford, John Bayley, a wonderfully subtle and wide-ranging critic who as far as I’m aware never wrote about Firbank himself. I was embarking on an MLitt thesis looking at the way gay British writers, in the early and mid-20th century, had negotiated the necessary ...”

“... cheap, and indeed looks very cheap as long as the cost of maintaining libraries is not counted in. John Burrows’s project of putting a dozen novels onto a computer was plainly from the first going to prove expensive. When one begins to cost Burrows’s travel, subsistence overseas, and time, together with computer-time, programmer-time and secretarial ...”

“... centrality in British culture. Characteristically feeble echoes of this assault were evident in John Major’s recent sneering at ‘progressive theorists’, but some years ago the real emotional dynamic was laid bare, indecently bare, by (as usual) Norman Tebbit, who extolled ‘the man in the pub’ against the upper-class ‘cocktail set’ on the ...”

“... than to elaborate principle into theory. His comprehension of Areo-pagitica, ‘a speech of Mr John Milton, for the liberty of unlicensed printing’, is profound in the immediacy with which it arrives at the principles at issue:The danger of such unbounded liberty, and the danger of bounding it, have produced a problem in the science of government, which ...”

“... Lord Northcliffe and the editor of Tit-Bits at its head. There had rapidly come into being what John Carey describes as ‘an alternative culture which bypassed the intellectual and made him redundant’. It was a culture that used itself up as it went along, but its audience could be numbered in millions and the delights it provided were not all that easy ...”

“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still ...”

“... son of Dr Arnold of Rugby, brother of Matthew and William Delafield Arnold, brother-in-law of W.E. Forster, father of Mrs Humphry Ward, grandfather of Julian and Aldous Huxley and of Mrs G.M. Trevelyan. His knockabout career helped enlarge his connections. At Oxford he stood on even closer terms of friendship with Clough than did his brother Matthew, despite ...”

“... to go with it. The assumption behind the readings makes a neat little summation of what E.M Forster called the ‘misty’ side of Conrad and the writer who was a practical seaman. Of course the combination made his genius what it was, but none the less there remains a distinct gap between the two Conrads: the writer and the ‘intellectual’. It is ...”

“... and was already a good way in by 2012, when the ‘restored’ Penguin edition by Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon came out, with more than 9000 corrections. How much of a difference this will make to readers in China isn’t obvious: the linguistic complexity of the work is probably lost for ever in Chinese. As far as I know, Dai hasn’t said anything about ...”

“... to longer pieces like Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude (which took nine months to print) and E.M. Forster’s Pharos and Pharillon (eighty pages) – demonstrates a capacity for care, patience and precision that should not be taken for granted. Printing, if one is to do it with any competence, has to become part of one’s life.On the afternoon of 25 January ...”

“... with literature by drawing breasts on a photograph of Virginia Woolf and kitting out E.M. Forster with a big cigar. Orton himself notoriously defaced library books before starting to write books himself. This resentment, which was, I suppose, somewhere mine, had to do with feeling shut out. A library, I used to feel, was like a cocktail party with ...”

“... babe so) even majestic in his mysterious silence after all the turmoil of the night before.’ Forster is curt in a note to T.E. Lawrence about their young friend Palmer: ‘I continue to be his banker, but other relationships are forbidden by Mrs Palmer and Mrs Palmer’s mother. They say I have tried to put him against them. This is true.’ How many of ...”

“... to believe that The Principle of Duty was the work of some autodidact unkindly imagined by E.M. Forster. Its rebarbative quality is exacerbated by Selbourne’s ostentatious contempt for his intellectual betters and a degree of self-regard that the author of a much better book than this would have no title to. ‘Given the scale of the moral and social ...”

“... When satire becomes surrealistic it drops off the map of genre. Unlike other Amis characters (John Self, Keith Talent, Clint Smoker), the arch-lout Asbo doesn’t carry around a name whose oddity and associations he is forbidden by the rules of the novel that contains him from recognising. He changed his name on his 18th birthday to harmonise with the ...”

“... heard before, of how Wheldon and the BBC went to inordinate lengths to block the publication of John Bowen’s novel The Birdcage because it featured the presenter of a television arts programme who in appearance and manner (‘a kind of scoutmaster of culture presenting units from his troop to the viewers for 45 minutes every Friday night’) seemed to be ...”