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“... his new novel, is an attempt to bring to life the thesis of the novelist in Mao II, Bill Gray: The novel used to feed our search for meaning . . . It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us towards something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which ...”

“... way things are all manner of discontinuous instrumentalities, and one of these is the aphorism. So John Gross’s Oxford Book of Aphorisms might, if properly used, be less a book to nod over than a neo-philosophical catena, an instance of the edifying that ousts the epistemological. As a matter of fact, it contains some strong anti-systematic ...”

“... buccaneers to consider, including Hannah Snell, who enlisted in a regiment of marines as James Gray and survived the sieges of Pondicherry and Devicotta undetected before outing herself to the public in 1750. Still, Barry’s was as spectacular a tale of imposture as any novelist of sensation could have dreamed up. It was a case that fascinated the eminent ...”

“... the entries in Who’s Who. There are some known names: Cecil Beaton, Jasper Johns, James Jones, John Mortimer, Patricia Neal, William Styron, Andy Warhol. Among the rest are antique dealers, decorators, magazine editors, a ‘freelance music co-ordinator for fashion shows’, a princess ‘internationally concerned with matters of spiritual evolution’, an ...”

“... the bewildering complexity of the Iran-Contra affair, and got gates galore. Since Oliver North and John Poindexter had communicated their fell designs through a system called the Prof computer, and since the thing hinged so much on transfers of hot and dirty money, I myself proudly came up with ‘Profligate’ which, though it won me no prizes, did get ...”

“... You don’t hate us in Scotland, Master?’ said Professor John Stuart Blackie, the Teuto-Gaelic classicist, to Jowett of Balliol. ‘We never think of you at all,’ came the lapidary reply. Drafting a sketch for a BBC radio programme on devolution, I was rung by Professor Phil Williams, a colleague at Aberystwyth who is also Plaid Cymru’s spokesman on energy ...”

“... is a derivative literariness that projects its own tittering onto the subject: the giggling, gray-green roar that fills a gorge (sweet Thames! run softly) old books refer to as the   vale of Tempe ... Eliotic echoes of that calibre belong (sec above) to journalism. For all her reputation as a poet, Clampitt frequently seems ripe for the travel pages ...”

“... ourselves too seriously. But for all the wisecracking, Fussell is right to quote also, as he does, John Adams in 1805: ‘The rewards ... in this life are esteem and admiration of others – the punishments are neglect and contempt.’ Or as John Locke had put it already, ‘the principal spring from which the actions of men ...”

“... muse lets rip through the rat-a-tat of Blind Hary’s Wallace; and in the brassy Reformation of John Knox it blares even in the sophisticated George Buchanan’s over-the-top ‘Elegy for Jean Calvin’. The volume remains high in some of Robert Fergusson’s sophistic-performative street-talk, Burns’s on-off, rip-roaring ‘Tam ...”

“... because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil.’ Much of Yeats’s work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote ...”

“... his. The Carcanet list that houses Patricia Beer is a good deal more harmonious; but it features John Ashbery, of whom one has to say that if he is right, Beer is wrong, and vice versa. It is not a new phenomenon: eclecticism coming on as catholicity. But what results is a delusive fecundity that can’t be kept track of: with so many new starts, how to ...”

“... in homosexuality, bad youthful poems, accounts of books like Three Weeks and The Picture of Dorian Gray that affected young Paul, are all given more space than their importance warrants, as later are the activities of the literary agent. There is indeed a little too much of everything: the passion for India, alienation from Penny, financial problems, sales ...”

“... as £168,000 from English copyrights. Another work that made a great deal of money in England was John Stainer’s The Crucifixion, first performed in 1887, and unmentioned by Pahlen. Called into question time and time again both for its ‘inane’ libretto and its patchy music, it was nonetheless described by one contemporary reviewer as ...”

“... many of them) that Amis received: several hundred from Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and others. These letters help supply the answers to niggling editorial puzzles: for example, the identity of ‘Bluebell’ (Conquest’s dog), or ‘engine driver Hunt’, from a passage in a letter reading ‘Praed, Hood, Gilbert ...”

“... John Sutherland’s pithy, cynical Life of Scott is very much a biography of our time: irreverent, streetwise, set foursquare in a ‘real world’ in which careers achieve money and power and character is at least 51 per cent image. In its worldly wisdom it resembles the first of its kind, John Gibson Lockhart’s pioneering five-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-8), though the drift of the two Lives is in opposite directions ...”