“... all times emphasised his spiritual kinship with fellow Swabians like Hegel, Hölderlin and Johann Peter Hebel (a writer of enchanting Alemannic folk-tales). He saw himself as a contributor to this tribal lineage, and associated his writings with it; his biographer reports on this powerful rural mystique, and is (as far as I know) the first author to do so ...”

“... sensitive bus named after me in Leeds. I just wish it could have been a tram.9 March. I am reading Colm Tóibín’s New Ways to Kill Your Mother. Of Hart Crane’s suicide he writes: ‘He walked on deck … took off his coat, folded it neatly over the railing (not dropping it on deck) … then suddenly he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The Fate of Rome (2017). The barbarians, meanwhile, have made a distinct comeback, since Peter Heather made a spirited case for their share of responsibility in The Fall of the Roman Empire (2005). Douglas Boin proposes another topical solution, blaming neither barbarians nor Romans but the relationship between them. One of the most important ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tribute is reproduced here in its entirety. The Glass of the Sinful Soul does not make for easy reading now, unless the reader has a special taste for a brand of women’s mysticism that began earlier, in Germany and the Lowlands, with the devotio moderna. Cries and ejaculations fly thick and fast, the soul seems to labour unavailingly, and sinks into a ...”

“... interpret such conflicts in terms of ideology or class legislation can find a useful corrective in Peter Jones’s demonstration of the almost infinite variety of local circumstances. What suited the wealthy in one village might work to the advantage of smallholders in the next. In a situation like this, any policy of innovation at the centre was bound to have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of becoming the greatest aviator since Orville and Wilbur Wright. But he hesitated. He had been reading Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell in his spare time, and believed that their inquiries into the foundations of logic heralded a revolution even more exciting than the invention of powered flight. He wanted to be part of it if he could. The following year ...”