“... touched with comedy as well as pathos. At times I was reminded of Compton-Burnett, and often of William Trevor. But the lines that kept on coming into my head were from another brooder on things that might have been, on wrong choices, on ruffled dignity:                      no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of ...”

“... that one of them was ‘almost good’ and Berryman was not as dismayed as he might have been when Malcolm Cowley called another batch ‘very skilful exercises, based on the very best models’. Berryman’s first poems were, in short, too academic. And so, too, it seems, were the plays he was also busily writing at this time. All the same, his academic ...”

“... to Egypt in the early 19th century convinced that it was, somehow, their home. Johann Burckhardt, William Thomson (known as Osman effendi), John Gardner Wilkinson, Robert Hay and Edward Lane also ‘went native’ on their travels. Like Champollion, they aped the robes and turbans of the Ottoman ruling class, browned their skin, and made a show of living in ...”

“... much more touchingly, Dorothy Wordsworth makes it clear whose eyes her own journal is for, after William and his brother John had left her in Trasmere, and set off to walk into Yorkshire, ‘cold pork in their pockets’: ‘I resolved to write a journal of the time till W and J return, and I set about keeping my resolve, because I will not quarrel with ...”

“... programmatic kind. It would not have been enough for him to set up as an Americanist writer in the William Carlos Williams mould, using the shape and language of his poetry to declare a cultural allegiance, or responsibility. The language of Tate’s poems was unvaryingly sonorous/ poetic and his verse persona tended always to the bardic/anonymous; his work on ...”

“... aged four, was sent to fill a cup of water from the pond at the back of the house and drowned; William Kembold, six, to draw water from the River Brett; and on and on, in a long roster of sorrow. Older children were bidden to do more obviously dangerous work. Thomas Hubbard, aged ten, was given a whip and told to conduct a horse-drawn plough at Dennington ...”

“... purposive, energetic-sounding verb ‘moved into’, is meaningless unless it is explained that William Golding’s The Paper Men was a late, and lame, novel of remarkable thinness by an old famous author about being a famous author. It was metafictional only in the way that reality TV is metatelevisual. Stevenson never reflects on a writer’s aesthetic ...”

“... in turn, are helped by Ella Grogan, the daughter of a local midwife and a gardener’s boy, William. All the characters in this hierarchy gain some narrative attention, but mainly it plays over the old man and the Paxtons’ daughter Alice. Between them, these two mark off a momentous span of English historical time. Alice is born on the eve of Eden’s ...”

“... young mind might well see any writer over the age of thirty as indistinguishable from a bag lady. Malcolm Bradbury is now a veteran novelist, something that makes his deft handling of thirty-years-younger Francis Jay the more remarkable. Ask who the leading young British novelists are and you may well be told Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, ...”

“... publishing world. The last time we met, a week before his trip to Seattle, he was wearing a Malcolm X cap and carrying a well-worn copy of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. On 8 July, after a breakfast with the Democratic presidential candidate and former basketball star Bill Bradley, Joe went to Mount ...”

“... posthumously from various surviving manuscript sources by his ex-pupil and literary executor, Malcolm Knox. It has only recently become clear quite how partial Knox’s compilation was – omitting, for example, or toning down much of Collingwood’s critique of Hegel. There was even more to come over the next half-century. His most lasting contribution ...”

“... as a Federation, published last year; while Conservatives at Westminster, including Kenneth Baker, Malcolm Rifkind and members of the so-called Democracy Taskforce set up by the Tories in opposition and headed by Ken Clarke, have over the past decade proposed various means of ironing out post-devolutionary wrinkles in the British political system. So too has ...”

“... keep the tradition’ was another of McQueen’s maxims. Customising was a watchword of punk, with Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood the subject of a more recent show at the Met also created by Andrew Bolton. Customising is a form of bespoke and bespoke relies on those trades that go back to the Middle Ages and are commemorated in the names of the City ...”

“... 27 September, 0 14 007458 9), Nineteen Eighty-Four and All’s Well? by Tom Winnifrith and William Whitehead (Macmillan, 104 pp., £15 and £5.95, 4 April, 033 33493 0), Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Secker, new edition, 241 pp., £7.95, 3 January, 0 436 35019 X), Nineteen-Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Penguin, new edition, 268 ...”

“... distancing himself from her lesbianism. More recently there has been a trend, exemplified by Janet Malcolm in Two Lives (2007), for disliking her writing but most of all disliking Stein for having made her accommodations with the Vichy regime.How alone Stein can seem, and how courageous! She was Jewish and lesbian and not only lesbian but butch and living ...”