“... For the first time I’m nervous flying to Belfast. It’s early morning, Friday 22 May, and radio reports tell of streams of voters heading to the polls. As I buy the Irish Times at the newstand in Terminal One, I catch sight of one of my graduate students – we nod and smile quickly. He’s flying to Cork to vote Yes ...”

“... causes of the indifference English critics have on the whole maintained toward literary theory. It may even have served to justify indifference to what Northrop Frye called for, and called ‘a coherent and comprehensive theory of literature, logically and scientifically organised, some of which the student unconsciously learns as he goes on, but the main ...”

“... and the epilogue is placed at the front of the book, before the main text even begins. This may be a Lutyens-like joke: but such lack of concern for proportion and arrangement seems peculiarly out of place, given the subject of the book. Most of the dwellings described here were not so much country houses as houses in the country: rustic retreats for ...”

“... machinery is here Clear day, clear room, plain desk, The hand, symbol of power, Here the veins may pour Into the deed, as the field Into the standing corn. The simple machinery is here Clear room clear day clear desk And the hand with its power To make the heart pour Into the word, as the sun Moves upward through the corn. This same poem tells us that ...”

“... literary history, often based on biography, is too credulous, and that writers and their advocates may have interests in lying. It can’t replace Lockhart or Johnson as a detailed biographical record (it’s a fraction of the length of either), but can and does target the ways in which they and their kind deceive. Rather like saints’ lives, to which they ...”

“... in 1939 the idea of Greece receded further, but what Collins calls Craxton’s ‘private war’ may have been the making of him. He went to the Central School and learned to draw, and through another of the floating population at his parents’ home met Peter Watson. In Watson, the heir to the Maypole Dairy Company fortune, and founder with Cyril Connolly ...”

“... the flat roof which for decades afterwards served as the Politburo’s reviewing stand for May Day and Revolution Day parades in Red Square. On such occasions, Getty writes, ‘the Politburo stood on Lenin’s tomb – literally on his body.’ The idea that traditional (Muscovite) practices resurfaced in the Soviet period has a long genealogy in ...”

“... bleak emotional weather of autobiographical works such as Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). Coetzee may not actively seek this response, but he can hardly be surprised by it. In Diary of a Bad Year a character who closely resembles the author – more of this figure later – imagines his father’s opinion of him. ‘A selfish child, he must have thought, who ...”

“... 11 short pieces called ‘The Payne Whitney Poems’. The Payne Whitney, I knew from reading about Robert Lowell, was a New York mental hospital, in the same way I knew from reading Lunar Caustic that the Bellevue was a New York mental hospital, and here was a clutch of texts fit to set beside Malcolm Lowry’s book, or Lowell’s ‘Waking in the Blue’ or ...”

“... of flintlock at dawn, but it is still associated with a certain glamour. The high-living image may hold true for some American ambassadors, many of whom are big donors and political appointees, but it’s not a realistic picture for most diplomats. In fact, diplomats are often quite isolated from the societies to which they are posted. Their central task ...”

“... skiing in Klosters, and a ten-day break with Andrew in Barbados paid for by the multi-millionaire Robert Sangster.’ At this point, Sangster had been a tax exile for twelve years. Stay classy.The Yorks charged Hello! magazine a quarter of a million quid for pics of their ‘homelife’. They took £126,000 from the Daily Express for an interview. She charged ...”

“... more than her share of misogynistic sex-baiting and condescension. Yet in some uneasy degree one may also sympathise with Hutchins’s first critics. There is something peculiar about the novelist’s erotic preoccupations, her almost queasy-making interest in the sensations of embodiment. Witness the first paragraphs of Victorine, the best of the eight, now ...”

“... Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance than Nash’s Regent Street, and one ruined pointed arch than all Wren’s churches put ...”

“... as one of the advantages of a nepotistical system. The author is a little puzzled, as the reader may well be, to know why so many Lyall dependents looked to ‘Uncle William’ for a career. As a dispenser of life’s prizes William hardly compared with his elder brother George, who was chairman of the East India Company and a Member of Parliament for the ...”

“... New York found the place almost monastic. Leary loved to turn people on, with various results. Robert Lowell, for example, seems to have felt uncomfortable. There are some scary bits, in Flashbacks, that force one to admire the recklessness of Leary. The hidden presence of the CIA is menacing, as was (and no doubt is) the extent of the Agency’s interest ...”