“... things the Saviour said or should have said – dense admonishments in nail polish too small to be read. No surface, she observes, ever seems equal to the psychic needs of those who create such crude and disquieting things: Their purpose wraps around the back of things and under arms; they gouge and hatch and glue on charms till likeable materials – apple ...”

“... must not be called in half-way through’), and a passion for English literature. The books she read with the inner group allowed for a certain release of emotion – in fact, for Miss Harrison’s soppy side: the Brownings, the Brontës, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Tagore’s ‘King of the Dark Chamber’ and ‘The Post Office’. When Charlotte Mew ...”

“... the constraints placed on Andrew, though not apparently on his opinions, we’re almost bound to read it more critically – even the non-conspiracy theorists among us – than we do most history books. One problem is that we can’t check anything, since most of the primary sources are listed simply as ‘security service archives’, with no further ...”

“... Puzo, Friedman, Brooks and the screenwriter David Zelag Goodman. Kurt Vonnegut began to show up. Peter Matthiessen was considered but rejected for mentioning too often his membership in the Institute of Arts and Letters. ‘It’s an organisation,’ Puzo said, ‘for guys who can’t get screen deals.’ Barring Vogel, the core members all got screen ...”

“... that was the secret of its ‘genius’. Philosophers were crazy for it too. Wittgenstein, who had read it ‘an extraordinary number of times’, went around quoting bits to friends. Heidegger kept a portrait of Dostoevsky on his desk; Nietzsche called him ‘the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn’. What most novelists would pay for blurbs ...”

“... his novel set in 18th-century Naples. In Les Trois Femmes de ma vie the young Dominique listens to Peter Pears singing Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in a booth at the HMV shop on Oxford Street, with a thrilled sense of eavesdropping on two levels of erotic complicity, not only between Michelangelo and his beloved but also between singer and ...”

“... others, Eric Griffiths. In an essay included in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (1985, edited by Peter Robinson), Griffiths expressed reservations about Hill’s ‘unsteady reliance on religious metaphors’ in his critical writings. In Hill’s essay ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement” ’ in particular, the idea that poetic language may escape ...”

“... in 1985) offers little more than a glimpse of a lifetime of painstaking research on Ruskin. Peter Fuller’s provocative Theoria was not a university product. There is no shared perspective in these books. Hewison and Fuller, Ruskin’s most polemical advocates, have made incompatible political claims for his thought. What they do have in common is a ...”

“... Pritchett merely plunges into him. But if the intellectual classes no longer know how to read a man of letters, and sad as this may be it is probably true, there would be no better way of rediscovering the art than through these essays. Their variety is huge and their range encyclopedic. Nor do they offer the slightest evidence anywhere of those ...”

“... to pull free from the gravity of MacCabe’s introduction. My advice would be to skip this or read it at the finish. MacCabe feels the need to place the text safely within the corporate body of world literature, to find something else that is just like it. He flies a few kites on sex and chess and alcohol. He expresses earnest amazement on learning that ...”

“... encyclopedic histories: in spite of being well over a thousand pages long, the book demands to be read from start to finish, from the Ice Ages to the New World Disorder, without selectivity. To begin by dipping and skipping is to miss the point, to break the spell and deprive oneself of a profound pleasure. In short, the bulk and the scope do not prevent this ...”

“... off debts, he sold out to Mark McCormack of the International Management Group, recently hired by Peter Mandelson to raise funds for Britain’s millennium celebrations. IMG runs the finances and Bollettieri runs everything else. Bollettieri emerges from the memoir as an endearing hustler, vain (about his waistline, his teeth, his muscles, his tan) but ...”

“... charm, genius, an exceptional business brain and a few socialist and pacifist instincts. But wait. Read the book carefully, and a benefactor emerges who, despite a manifest lack of genius or socialist principles, did much more than either Souter or Gloag for Stagecoach. Margaret Thatcher and her eager disciple Nicholas Ridley privatised the National Bus ...”

“... Brian Finney’s 1979 biography. Film rights were sold for $400,000 and book rights for $100,000. Peter Parker, who is writing Isherwood’s authorised biography, was incredulous: ‘They must be bonkers. It is the most extraordinary story – Hollywood gush.’ Memories are short on the West Coast, but everyone dimly remembered that Cabaret had been very ...”

“... Brideshead Revisited. In fact, he doesn’t just pick it, he goes to pieces over it: ‘I have read Brideshead Revisited at least a dozen times and have never failed to be charmed and moved, even to tears.’ At least a dozen times? Well, if you say so. Still, it’s all good fun, we will be told, and it drums up business for ‘the trade’. I’m not so ...”