“... refusing all promotion while perfecting his poetic craft. Good behaviour and a friendship with Philip Larkin have allowed the image of Watkins as a hard-working, pleasant and largely irrelevant anachronism to prevail, and for poets and critics to forgive him, by forgetting how in the 1930s and 1940s, under the influence of Dylan Thomas, he was an eager ...”

“... Herzog, self-berating and uncomfortable with his reputation like the fictionalised versions of Philip Roth. Free of the priapic obsessions of Sabbath or Portnoy or the gynophobia of Bellow’s Sammler, Humboldt or Ravelstein, Seigl is wilfully solitary, stripped of ties: ‘A big ungainly man with a curious kind of grace’. At the beginning of the novel ...”

“... Huebsch, but the brightest example, the most sustained retraction of the claws, is reserved for Philip Garland, the brain-damaged son of his long-suffering cousin Peggy. At length and with great care he writes of animals, music and travel, gently encouraging the disturbed boy without condescension. ‘Now you will have to write back, as you promised,’ he ...”

“... Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s style couldn’t fail to register the impact of his hold on America’s consciousness: he ...”

“... of the West End which were novel and luxurious for the later Georgians were pavements, plate glass shop windows and streets lit at night. The German novelist Sophie von La Roche was in her fifties when she visited London and she had never seen anything like Oxford Street. ‘Just imagine,’ she wrote home in 1786, ‘a street taking half an hour to ...”

“... a capitalist-industrial and bourgeois-democratic age. Perhaps what is remarkable is not that the glass is three-quarters empty but that it is still a quarter full. How on earth can it be that enough of this irrelevant and functionless residue of an antiquated social system should still be left for academics to sneer at, militants to hate, nostalgics to ...”

“... communities. Perhaps there is too great a reliance upon certain writers (such as John Aubrey and Philip Stubbes), and arguably the eccentricities of some folkloric approaches are countenanced over-generously: but Laroque would be the first to admit that the sources are fragmentary, and his coverage of a range of anthropological perspectives is indicative of ...”

“... aircraft headed heaven knows where into the Brazilian interior – and at one point he raises a glass, like an excited schoolboy, to Adventure. He has learned to tell stories not in newspaper offices but in executive suites. Their occupants – those men who may, just possibly, lend him the money to turn his ideas into ‘light’ – have only a limited ...”

“... she once said. What gets her going is also a matter of chance or luck: Landscape includes a long glass case containing the collection of four, five, six, seven and nine-leaf clovers she began in childhood. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a 56-minute film, Antigone, which explores the gap between Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus – Oedipus is blinded ...”

“... in areas previously undreamed of. The only reason we have seen the bankers, or Rupert Murdoch or Philip Green having to account for their sins is that they have been summoned by select committees. These days there is even a committee to which the intelligence and security services are supposed to be accountable – an imperfect one (it reports to the prime ...”

“... that have held out against the global trend to market economies and rising living standards,’ Philip Hammond, the chancellor of the Exchequer, noted during his speech in Manchester, ‘but it is only a few. Like Cuba, which I visited last year as foreign secretary, where, curiously, I found cows in the fields but no milk in the shops … That’s what ...”

“... I don’t handle divorce business.’ In general, scholarly investigators should follow Philip Marlowe’s rule. One feels degraded when Dickens’s private letters are subjected to infra-red photographic analysis (as they were in the 1950s). Beneath the crossings-out are references to Ellen Ternan, his mistress – or perhaps not his mistress ...”

“... Imagism comes in too. He looks at a landscape with half-closed eyes through a mist, or in a Claude-glass, or upside down from between his legs; and this is not a good way to read a novel, which is usually better read as if it were a history. Also it is rather unfair to take the chief examples from the Gospels, because there many readers have an extra ...”

“... were also laudatory articles on contemporary architects such as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller. The architects were themselves portrayed as playboys, the architectural and sexual revolutions intimately enmeshed. In Pornotopia, Beatriz Preciado writes that in 1950s issues of Playboy, ‘there were ...”

“... Instead, Buckingham became one of James’s cupbearers. He stood at James’s elbow, kept his glass topped up with wine and bent his ear close to hear him talk. James drank and talked a lot at mealtimes. Buckingham was, as the balladeers soon had it, Ganymede to James’s Jove.By the time Buckingham arrived at court, James’s relationship with ...”