“... of Joyce on his work. He held by his stern avowal that his mature style was formed long before he read Ulysses with any attention. That flypaper feel, however, means that Nabokov is, consciously and unconsciously, an aural retentive. A conscious example: ‘bizarre, tender, salivating Dr Humbert, practising on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of ...”

“... I see on the news in the evening the vast concourse of people gathered in Washington. I don’t read any official estimates of the numbers though it’s to be hoped they estimate more accurately in the US than they do here, where any demonstration of which the police disapprove – the Stop the War marches, for instance – is routinely marked down whereas ...”

“... and ‘the smell of hay still opens a path to the farthest and fondest places in me.’To read Heaney’s memories of his early life is to find not only rural, familial experience (hauling sacks of grain, buying eggs from ‘the egg man’ and the like) but rural and local words: ‘A “groop” [was] a sunk trench in the concrete floor … to drain ...”

“... In fact nobody had to rely on ‘rumours’ for that intelligence; they had only to read the Times. The owner of Cliveden, Bill Astor, a former Conservative MP whom Profumo had earlier thought ‘not a very nice man’, was ‘the Lord’ in Wilson’s ‘dingy quadrilateral’. He certainly lacked the abilities and attractiveness of his three ...”

“... Odysseus’ behaviour the night before he slaughters his wife Penelope’s suitors, which Peter Green translates like this: As a man cooking a paunch chockful of fat and blood on a fierce blazing fire will turn it to and fro, determined to get it cooked through as fast as he can, so Odysseus tossed this way and that, trying to work out how he was ...”

“... hard to look at the frontispiece of the first edition of Olive Schreiner’s short novel Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897). Titled ‘photograph’, it shows three dead African men hanging from a tree, their legs trussed with a farmer’s rope. Enjoying the sport are Englishmen in shirtsleeves and broad-brimmed hats, their grins set off by heavy ...”

“... and surveillance cameras, as an Arcadian grotto. They have no problem with deferred pleasure. They read the future like a transcendent comic strip. Old Thames is rejuvenated in a Mediterranean blue. There are avenues of potential trees, future forests. Docklands is a garden city, clean, broad-avenued, free of traffic and peopled entirely by vibrant ...”

“... and of the Norreys family who lived there. I leave it open on a chair hoping that Rupert will read it, Rycote Church being one of his favourite places. Also open on another chair is Richard Hoggart’s Promises to Keep, in which among other things he mentions not feeling he belongs to ‘the English Literary Happy Family’, as I hope neither do I.21 ...”

“... be discovered. My first encounter was a series of debates at the back of the football bus in which Peter Ustinov took on Ribbentrop’s son on the justice of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. A few months later, these ideas, and other ideas – Surrealism, colloquial poetry, and the new architecture – were everywhere. There was a new dawn, but a dawn forced on by ...”

“... based on Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture ‘Why I am not a Christian’: ‘If you were to read his essay,’ he tells the dean, ‘and in the interest of open-mindedness I would urge you to do so, you would find that Bertrand Russell, who is one of the world’s foremost logicians as well as a philosopher and a mathematician, undoes with logic that is ...”

“... he apparently had a touch of dyslexia and was not much good at punctuation the diaries are hard to read. Many entries, especially when they concern his schooldays, are repetitive, and some simply lack interest, so the editors cut a good deal that treats of games and other trivialities. Evans compensates for these lacunae by reproducing the selected items ...”

“... reproduces his bill from a pizzeria in Verona, dated 1980: it was in this restaurant that he first read about the murders (but not yet the fate or names of the murderers). It shows the date of the dinner, the price of the pizza and the wine, and the names of the owners. One of them is called Cadavero. You wouldn’t have to be paranoid to feel targeted by ...”

“... was impressed by the much older William Burroughs; a year later he encountered Jack Kerouac. He read Hart Crane, adopting and adapting the passion for rhetoric, but ignoring Crane’s attempt to comprehend the culture of the past in a vision of contemporary America. He ignored also Crane’s metrical strictness, and under the influence of William Carlos ...”

“... roll-call of radical Jewish dissent extends from Adorno and Benjamin through Kafka and Lukacs to Peter Weiss and Arnold Zweig. But his argument simplifies a more complex problem. His generalisations about Jewish trouble-makers would apply almost equally well to a Catholic like Heinrich Böll, a Marxist like Brecht or a feminist like Christa ...”

“... fastidious, a Labour Conference was always disconcerting. Speeches from the floor were solemnly read or delivered with mounting hysteria. Clumsy populist sentiments and extravagant doctrinaire claims were equally applauded. Unpopular remarks might be shouted down. But in an age when the great set speech was increasingly rare and platform oratory out of ...”