“... the old fart’s bag of tricks still amuses. But I think I would have liked this novel more had it been the first of the author’s that I’d read. The narrator of Galapagos is Leon Trotsky Trout, son of our old friend Kilgore, the SF writer who has wonderful ideas for novels but can’t write worth a damn. (I’ve seen it said that Trout is based ...”

“... the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure. The tourist class was invented by Thomas Cook when he assembled an excursion to the Paris Exposition in 1855. Tourists change their places in groups, live as comfortably as possible, take pleasure in gregariousness, obey injunctions, keep to the main roads, and fulfil plans made by tour-promoters ...”

“... academic papers and of undigested research data is exaggerated. Imaginative historians such as Thomas Carlyle have not simply been censured for an excess of poetic licence. They have been forgotten. Yet Carlyle’s convictions on the relationship of history and poetry are at least worthy of consideration. It is important to check and verify, as Carlyle ...”

“... trained as a beautician and sometimes got a little. It might be depilating ladies’ legs, but more often it was scrubbing their floors. Pavel – now Paul – was put in a Jewish children’s home, where his mother visited him on Sundays. From his point of view, the fall of France improved matters, because his parents carried him off to a small spa near ...”

“... book says, ‘one of the great undiscovered eccentrics of the 19th century’. She enjoyed far more than fifteen minutes of fame, even though it did not get her into the usual reference books. She was the subject of a biography, in 1959, by Edward Grierson, Storm Bird: The Strange Life of Georgina Weldon, which Brian Thompson commends in his bibliography ...”

“... late 18th century. Benjamin Franklin, the first US ambassador to France, made four return trips. Thomas Paine made five. And Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, made eight, six of them in as many years, starting in 1777, as he became involved in first the American Revolutionary War and then the French Revolution. Lafayette is currently appearing as ...”

“... about him). Norton-Taylor blamed me, with justice, for having scuppered not only Scottish but, more important to him, Welsh devolution. I regarded Norton Taylor as a romantic nationalist – which, as far as I am concerned, is about the lowest rung in the political demonology. A number of journalists have mastered the intricacies of the Belgrano ...”

“... With V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) to his credit so far, Thomas Pynchon, American of no known address, is possibly the most accomplished writer of prose in English since James Joyce. This is not to say that he is also the best novelist, whatever that would mean, but that sentence by sentence he can do more than any novelist of this century with the resources of the English-American language and with the various media by which it is made available to us, everything from coterie slangs to technological jargons, from film to economic history, from comic books to the poetry of T ...”

“... for what it is, a masterpiece. But Crabbe’s work, like that of the contemporary Austrian master Thomas Bernard, is still not widely read. In his own day Crabbe was a famous and distinguished author – the favourite of both Jane Austen and Byron. And while he had two distinct and distinctly successful careers, until the last two decades of his long life he ...”

“... uses it (twice) in All’s well that ends well, the word ‘Puritan’ signifies nothing more than ‘anti-Papist’. In Pericles, it occurs as a straightforward synonym for ‘virtuous’ and even as late as The Winter’s Tale the single ‘puritan’ among the sheep-shearers in Bohemia is no refuser of festivity. He contents himself with fitting ...”

“... took the hint of Byron’s Horatian manner to write the urbane Julian and Maddalo. But, much more important, each brought to fruition in the other a pre-existing style of genius quite opposite to his own. It was Byron’s company, of all things, that seems to have spurred Shelley to write Prometheus Unbound; and it was renewed acquaintance with ...”

“... both twitching at the bang and wail of a microphone being switched on, looking for all the world more the sinners than the sinned against. Me thinking, did you do your own daughter? Beyond the pervasive sense of rottenness – all of Peace’s books carry a distaste that suggests a moralist at work – specific references to the politics of the early ...”

“... options. Yet abusive letters haven’t altogether gone away, and receiving one now might feel even more uncomfortable. You can reply to an email if you choose, or entangle yourself in a Twitterstorm. Or you can block an unwelcome sender. Anonymous letters are different. You can react, but you can’t respond. Whatever the medium, the corrosive sense of ...”

“... make George Gissing’s acquaintance because of it’: which is not so surprising, perhaps, since more than one Gissing scholar has claimed that his novel drew on his relations with Clara, even though it was written before they met. Many of Gissing’s letters to Clara survive, though there is a momentous gap, lamented by Gissing scholars, when she tore up a ...”

“... education secretary, calling for a review of the teaching of history in schools. ‘Nothing is more important to the survival of the British nation,’ he had declared, ‘than an understanding among its young of our shared heritage and the nature of the struggles, foreign and domestic, which have secured our freedoms … a nation which loses sight of its ...”