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“... gushing sentences, his spiral or circular forms, his pages written for ‘the luxury of diagonal reading’: the writing compacted, ellipses squeezed out of it like air bubbles, as in Daudet or Céline, a fear of full stops, a contempt for the onward march of paragraphs. (In her 2014 book on Hrabal, Monika Zgustová tells us that each year on 1 May, the holy ...”

“... and from above, the yard is one of those places where the city’s built environment seems to peter out and go to seed; though crossed by fences and framed by the sides of buildings, it seems indifferent to any formal order. Fried speaks of a ‘sense of makeshiftness, of an entire environment having been put together, constructed, not in a spirit of ...”

“... strike on Nasser’s Egypt. And so on. Benn’s socialism has always been steeped in a certain reading of the English radical tradition – 1640, 1837, 1900 – but in his twilight years it is the spirit of 1945 that he invokes with most passion. It would be wrong, however, to assume that the cult of Tony Benn comes down to his dogged restatement of old ...”

“... like the miraculous Glastonbury Thorn that flowered on Christmas Day. The Puritan preacher Hugh Peter wanted to pull down Stonehenge, and the 18th-century Baptist Thomas Robinson boasted that he had ‘killed’ 40 stones at Avebury with his own hands. But, like the radicals who proposed that all churches and cathedrals should be razed to the ground, they ...”

“... lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too ...”

“... There were frequent personality clashes, the most serious of them in the 1980s between Peter Marychurch of GCHQ and Bill Odom of NSA, who regarded Marychurch as a patronising amateur. ‘Socially,’ Odom said, ‘I no longer find the British amusing, merely a pain in the ass.’ Kissinger, cross with Edward Heath, actually suspended intelligence ...”

“... life – emblematically, almost mythologically – sets out challenges faced by many writers. Peter Alexander’s biography, Les Murray: A Life in Progress (2000), is a volume every poet and aspiring poet should buy, filch or borrow. Having first met Murray in 1985, I filched it almost as soon as it was published (and draw on it here). The most arresting ...”

“... bang, but not before we’ve been filled in at inordinate length on the heroine’s dreams and reading habits and her extensive family network of shabby-genteel Southern types. Tartt, who grew up in Mississippi, told an interviewer: ‘Everything went into The Little Friend for a decade. It’s all there.’ She wasn’t joking, and beyond the suffocating ...”

“... did in those days when they’d elected to be married to great men. She wrote in her diary after reading his 1956 novel, Homecoming, that I hope he gets his due now. I have no doubt … that posterity will give it him. It is deep & true & heart-rending: & for once – for him – joyful. [I] needed to be alone with C., and close to him, just to let him know ...”

“... generations. A fifth study began in 2000 – the story is that it was set up at the behest of Peter Mandelson as a more enduring way of marking the millennium than a big wheel or a dome – and has been following around 20,000 children born between late 2000 and early 2002. A sixth study was planned for 2015. The Life Study was to be the biggest ...”

“... people had their roots in the working classes, and were denying their own people just as St Peter did to Jesus.’ Generally, Mars-Jones’s prose is exceptionally nimble, dry, humorously restrained, very English, with a little Nabokovian velvet too. He can describe more or less anything and make it interesting. This description of John’s mother ...”

“... model for Bond. Ainsworth, the eldest son of a wealthy Manchester lawyer, had spent his childhood reading about highwaymen, but was no highwayman himself, though he had Turpin’s contempt for respectable society. ‘We have not had the pleasure of being acquainted with Mrs Ainsworth,’ a correspondent wrote in Fraser’s Magazine, ‘but we are sincerely ...”

“... her work by those ‘fed too long on the pieties of academia’, her novels have been required reading on a number of university courses in the United States and elsewhere for a while now: when I started the first term of my first year at a South African university in the 1980s, Martha Quest was right there at the top of the booklist, ahead of Dickens and ...”

“... in the dim light of dawn to visit one of the males in his own territory.’ Back in the 1960s, Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive arachnid, turned into Spiderman and acquired the ability to scuttle up the sides of tall buildings. Birkhead’s book could inspire a whole new breed of pornographic superheroes, replete with extraordinary powers and dark ...”

“... are secretly at one: if the illusions of suburban consciousness are to be shattered, and the reading subject put in touch with his or her permanent, imperishable selfhood, a good many guerrilla raids on ordinary language will prove necessary. But Modernism proves unable to stabilise the relation between the changeless and the contingent – a relation ...”