“... street was demolished in 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the wall of a ...”

“... Vinal, already the mother of one illegitimate child, swore that the father of her next was one Richard Parkes, ‘husbandman of the parish of Ringmer’. On 25 October Turner set off at 2 a.m. for Ringmer, accompanied by two colleagues from East Hoathly, one of whom, a prosperous farmer called Jeremiah French, was known to Turner as a scourge of paupers ...”

“... published in 1971; a second major book, Allegories of Reading, appeared in 1980.* Anyone who has read even a single essay of de Man’s can gauge the quality of his mind. Many of his early pieces circulated as if they were dangerous to the academy, and assured him a samizdat reputation. His was an analytical temper that preferred essay to book, and each ...”

“... The most constant members of the group during this period were Bonamy Dobrée, F.S. Flint, Herbert Read and Orlo Williams, all of whom were frequent contributors (and, therefore, frequent recipients of letters from Eliot), with several others participating more sporadically. In practice, Eliot still seems to have made the decisions and carried on the editorial ...”

“... its certainties irretrievable. The writer is trapped inside a dialectical cage. That’s why we read him.Fanon’s prose defies translation: even his titles are obscure. Les Damnés de la terre doesn’t mean The Wretched of the Earth. Not really. Not unless you know what ‘la terre’ signifies to the French (too much, alas) and where the whole phrase ...”

“... short, a cult.‘Learned diversions, paranoid transitions, hip coincidences and conspiracies’, I read in the TP entry in my useful Cultural Icons encyclopedia. ‘The reclusive Pynchon writes as if everything is connected to everything else, and detours so obsessively en route that even the revelation that there is actually no revelation seems ...”

“... week. 15 April. I have given all my literary archive to the Bodleian Library and this afternoon Richard Ovenden, the keeper of special collections, comes round to load up the hundred or so box files and take them to Oxford. There will be more in due course, including all my notebooks and the annotated copies of the printed stuff, but I’m very happy to see ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”

“... years old). ‘Dear Mr Gable,’ Garland sings,I am writing this to youAnd I hope that you will read it so you knowMy heart beats like a hammerAnd I stutter and I stammerEvery time I see you at the picture show.I guess I’m just another fan of yoursAnd I thought I’d write and tell you so.She then starts to sing the familiar words:You made me love you.I ...”

“... speculative capitalism that gave rise to the semi-Brutalist office and housing projects of Richard Seifert, such as the Anderston Centre in Glasgow, a half-finished and shoddily renovated sub-Barbican of monumental towers connected by walkways across a raised podium. Seifert, as Hugh Casson pointed out, had ‘loyalty to his clients’ where other ...”

“... own house and a son at boarding school. I don’t know why I expected anything of her, I hadn’t read The Golden Notebook, or any of the other books about women who actually lived lives. I sensed her confidence and sophistication. She exuded calm as we sipped the soup, though it turned out she felt nothing of the sort, as why should she, opening the door to ...”

“... Library branches were stuffed with new fiction and old treasures, which anyone could borrow or read. Anyone over eighteen could explore the marble labyrinths of what is now called the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building: a palace of the people on 42nd Street, traditionally known as the Main or Central Branch, with its encyclopedic holdings. In the reading ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... them: ‘I think that I am a shy, jellylivered woman with no shred of confidence. But when people read the patterns of my life, they usually do not agree.’ It is the survivor, after all, who lives to tell the tale.Emecheta was born in Lagos in July 1944, the wettest month at latitudes just north of the equator. Her father was a railway worker who had fought ...”

“... in Gaza, climate change. The Democrats, according to the polls, had lost their appeal to men. We read about the voter gender gap. We read that the disparity was greatest between divorced women (who lean heavily Democratic) and divorced men (who tend to vote Republican). We read that ...”