“... only by my mother and grandfather’. Eileen also mentioned it to my grandmother, Ursula, who read the books, hiding them away from her children under the quilt – so perhaps this was the kind of secret that people in Dublin were happy to know. After I read Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce in my twenties, I ...”

“... that it is time to start afresh – to achieve new ends with new means. Thus, to those who have read Kant’s first Critique, Hume and Leibniz will always look a bit primitive in their understanding of the philosopher’s task. Hegel never quite recovered from Marx’s description of his social and historical role. Nietzsche is still reeling from ...”

“... own heartbeat: its sequence flatters you with what you want to hear. As the book’s narrator, Richard Papen, discovers the golden campus and its gang of five mysterious Classics students, so his yearning to find out more about this cosy world becomes identical with the reader’s, and a childish pact is joined (as in the best romances). Tartt’s writing ...”

“... a patina of middle-classness, his beginning wasn’t much grander than my own. He and his brother Richard had been brought up in a similarly boxy little house in a similarly depressing part of Haywards Heath by his single teacher mother. Although his family was much better educated than mine, it was still trapped in the same sort of grim lower echelons of the ...”

“... Sir James’s elevation and his year-long battle to punish Private Eye and jail its editor, Richard Ingrams – an effort which was supported by Wilson and Lady Falkender, both victims of Ingrams’s harassment, and which petered out in a relatively painless settlement in 1976? Ingrams’s theory is that there was such a connection. Goldsmith is no ...”

“... Dennett would be one of the first to come to mind. Like The Concept of Mind, this book can be read with genuine pleasure by a non-philosopher; anyone who picks it up will be swept up in the excitement of Dennett’s project. Even a reader who has never looked into a psychology book, or taken an interest in computers, will find herself absorbed in ...”

“... difficulty in Our Mutual Friend, is also likely to be the chief difficulty facing the reader of Richard Poirier’s ambitious and eloquent plea for the ‘renewal’ of literature and criticism through a better understanding of Emerson. Believing all may involve something close to a conversion. Believing none will do scant justice to the work of one of the ...”

“... not one which Stendhal would have bothered to write, and no audience would have been concerned to read it. ‘Comme il insiste peu,’ André Gide enthused. But his admiration, like Balzac’s, reminds us just how much great writing and great novels, not least those of Scott or Balzac, have depended on their own kind of insistence. Systematically, they devour ...”

“... stick – and the protesters were singing ‘Oh Canada’ every chance they got.Didn’t they read the news? Apparently not. Many just wanted positive vibes, finding the MSM a real downer. ‘How can they prove all those people died of Covid? I don’t know a single person who’s died.’ Others had curated their internet feeds to show them only what ...”

“... there of ‘creation science’. I can imagine them rubbing their hands with glee when they read things like: ‘one can only long for the 18th century, when Linnaeus could classify animals and plants without worrying about evolution.’ I know this quotation is taken out of context, but that’s what creationists do all the time, and it’s a grave ...”

“... within it – and with a sense of humour entirely lacking in historical novelists.’ In London, Richard Ollard, an editor at Macmillan, was similarly impressed by O’Brian’s ‘originality, gusto and … really astonishing knowledge of the sources’. He was ‘a more than competent hand at characterisation’, Ollard, a former navy ...”

“... British Consulate in Florence on 29 September 1913, a Monday. According to his death certificate, Richard Roberts, a 67-year-old Justice of the Peace and builder, staying at the Hotel Londres & Métropole in Florence, died at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova on Saturday, 27 September 1913. The consul, Alfred Lemon, was informed of the death by R. Ellis ...”

“... on the bronze plaque on the stern, but only by tilting your head can you make out the faded ‘RICHARD’ below.I now know a good deal about the Bonhomme Richard. I know that it was originally a French merchant vessel called the Duc de Duras; that it was loaned to the fledgling US navy; and that it took part in the War ...”

“... means). Conrad then takes us to the oyster bars. They sound sinister indeed – if you haven’t read Dickens, that is: The oyster bars of New York are doubly fugitive, both subterranean and cellular. They are excavated beneath the ground, approached by ‘downward flights of steps’, and constructed to reflect the ungregarious nature of the oyster ...”

“... in his journal, which he kept from 1887 until his death in 1910, and it’s there, too, that we read him rebuking himself for this awkward attempt at a chat-up line.In comparison to the photographer Félix Nadar, who died the same year and who made his red hair part of a spectacular commercial identity, alluding to it in his famous scarlet signature and ...”