“... of ‘crimes against taste’. David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research for the English hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad ...”

“... Stanford University, I was given the chance to spend a year in the Creative Writing Program in the English Department. I was not at all convinced that creative writing could be taught in the classroom, but I felt I could do with a year’s time to think and write. For two afternoons each week I and about ten of my fellow students would gather for two hours in ...”

“... point here: The term ‘outsider art’ was coined by the art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for ‘art brut’ (‘raw art’ or ‘rough art’), a label created by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates. While ...”

“... such negativity had all but drained away. ‘A new generation of Dadaists has emerged today,’ Richard Hamilton wrote in 1961, ‘but son of Dada is accepted.’ With Jeff Koons, the current maestro of the readymade, whose work is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney in New York (until 19 October), acceptance has become affirmation, even ...”

“... siuzhet,’ Belknap continues, ‘is more Rabelaisian: the first ten words in the English translation produce an expectation of prating piety. The last two words frustrate that expectation.’ That’s putting it mildly. One could write another short book about the literary effects hiding in the word ‘frustrate’. Belknap puts in a good ...”

“... brought classical education under pressure from science, as well as from subjects such as English literature, which was beginning to construct its own canon and articulate its claims to represent the best of vernacular, national culture. Even at Oxford and Cambridge, the arrival of new notions of discipline and method (often imported from Germany with ...”

“... the seventh magic bullet and literally all Hell breaks loose. The playbill for a production at the English Opera House makes no mention of the music, which must have been inaudible, promising instead a ‘Storm and Hurricane’ during which ‘the Daemon of the Hartz Mountains appears, the Rattle of Wheels and the Tramp of Horses are Heard.’ The mounting ...”

“... to wobble somewhat as to the chops.)’ To this and other tips and observations the long-suffering Richard Ryder replied, poker-penned: ‘The contents of your correspondence have been carefully noted,’ and – doubts obviously stirring – returned Henry’s usual enclosure of £1 ‘with best wishes as always’. The Further Letters of Henry Root, in other ...”

“... of Francis Spufford’s engaging new book calls them, meaning above all Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins – believe in spite of all evidence that eventually the religious will see sense. And yet with their magical belief in the truth of science – their taking for granted a consensus about the value of scientific evidence – and their unspoken ...”

“... shyness meant she would always hate it, that both her parents were academics (Ellmann’s father, Richard, was Joyce’s biographer, her mother, Mary, a celebrated Tennyson scholar). The unspooling of all of this is intercut with shorter sections, written in full sentences, describing the journey of a cougar that sets out across Ohio to find her stolen ...”

“... millennials: Baume christened Frankie after the precocious underachiever in Franny and Zooey, an English major who’s ‘sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody’. Her epigraph – ‘the worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly’ – is borrowed from another Salinger ...”

“... of the right and proper use of character stereotypes, and of Mayhem Parva, her own special English village fantasy with its definitions of the middle class under pressure. While not caring for some of her attitudes, he seems right to respect ‘the typically Christiean lack of compassion’. Uncondescending and highly perceptive, it’s the first book ...”

“... on which the artist feasted for a fortnight. Spencer’s enthusiasm for garbage is not unique in English art. According to Ruskin, Turner ‘not only could endure, but enjoyed and looked for litter, like Covent Garden wreck after the market’. His pictures are ‘often full of it, from side to side’ and he ‘delights in shingle, débris, and heaps of ...”

“... an 18th-century house, brought up, truth to tell, in the 18th century.’ He went to Eton and read English at Cambridge, where he met Nick Tomalin, Hugh Thomas, Mark Boxer and Neal Ascherson. Among the enduring friendships of his student years was that of the founding editor of the LRB, Karl Miller. McEwen and his wife, Romana, later went on a road trip with ...”

“... in 1764. Woodcut illustrations, scanty before the 19th century, can be found as early as 1681 in Richard Burton’s Historical Remarques. The great age of the London guidebook began, however, in the middle of the 19th century, as David Webb has shown in the London Journal (1980, No 2). One important development illustrates nicely that odd relationship ...”