“... his affection and managing things better. I ended up quarrelling, as I’m reassured, reading his letters, to find that several of his friends and pupils did, though I’m glad I made it up with him before he died. I called to see him one afternoon at Quainton and we sat in the garden talking. Suddenly he said, apropos of nothing, ‘I think I’m ...”

“... at Williams’s feet in the early Sixties, there is Terry Eagleton, ‘as allusively charming as Peter Wimsey’; at New Left Review, when it was embarking on its theoretical turn in 1962, the ‘virtuoso eloquence’ of Perry Anderson was backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had read Sartre and de Beauvoir in the ...”

“... If Jesus himself were one of his characters, there he would be, centre-forward and listening to Peter Gabriel, carrying his coffee cup to the sink. Being ‘closely bound to the moment’ is a paradisiacal state, as Egil explains. We are certainly that. The moment, according to Kierkegaard, was ‘the very gateway to the Kingdom of God’. So Knausgaard’s ...”

“... Valentine Ackland sent her new lover, Sylvia Townsend Warner, a book about bisexuality. ‘After reading it carefully,’ she reported with evident relief, ‘I discover that you and I are admirably suited to each other.’ Warner was quick to imagine bisexuality as a kind of physiological oscillation. ‘Do we do it in alternate spasms, do you think, like ...”

“... on Sofiyskaya Embankment, where they were guests of the ambassador. Berlin sat up all night reading the typescript. He was ‘deeply shaken’. He wept. Dr Zhivago was a ‘magnificent poetical masterpiece in the central tradition of Russian literature’, ‘a personal avowal of overwhelming directness, nobility and depth’. It was a ‘unitary ...”

“... but now part of a free-standing unit in limed oak. It was this house where Eric Korn heard someone reading out the plaque as being to ‘William Butler Yeast’. ‘Presumably,’ Eric wanted to say, ‘him responsible for the Easter Rising.’ 17 February. Stopped by a man outside the post office in Regents Park Road who fishes in his wallet and shows me a ...”

“... sensuous, wholly irrational – gentle but of a determination that only death could gainsay. Reading this, it is not hard to understand why The Sheltering Sky made a deep impression on two of the most gullible forces in the Western world in the second half of the 20th century – the American public and Bernardo Bertolucci. The book was on the New York ...”

“... friend of ours’; for Lamb, ‘the animalcule’; Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth took to calling him Peter Quince. Even his friends tended to diminish him: ‘Poor little fellow!’ Carlyle exclaimed to his wife, Jane, who mused: ‘What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk.’ Scarcely surprising, then, that De Quincey was touchy, quick ...”

“... and unroll one in a smarmy, bourgeois, sugar-dazed languor.It was a heroin Christmas because I was reading the greatest book I’ve ever read: the jazz musician Art Pepper’s 1979 autobiography Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper. It knocked my former top pick – Clarissa – right out of first place. As Art himself might say, my joint is getting big just ...”

“... creed of a dismal little sect. But despite his growing reputation as the abracadabra man behind Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, Sinclair doesn’t write as a believer either here or in Lud Heat (1975). Placing his own necromancy closer to the tradition of Rimbaud than to that of Madame Blavatsky, he uses myth to cut through contemporary closures: to drag Brick ...”

“... to notice this?’ The procedure requires a Leavisite lavishness of long quotation, and after reading the book, one has a stronger aftertaste of Trollope (now better understood) than of his exegete Stephen Wall, who remains an unfailingly helpful but unobtrusive intelligence. The key to Wall’s readings is never to force anything, always letting the ...”

“... allegiances bear significant responsibility for a United States ‘increasingly segregated’ (as Peter Shrag recently put it in the Nation) ‘between the winners in the global economy in their highrise offices and their privately policed, gated residential developments and a sort of lumpenproletariat, much of it black or Hispanic, stuck in rotting ...”

“... her daughter troubled but free to dream up an alternative life, and to develop her vital allure reading movie magazines. Norma Jeane had a keen sense of how to conquer people’s affections – especially those of men. She wore lipstick. She wore short skirts. She told a sad story of her upbringing. And after a spell modelling and flirting and screwing and ...”

“... She wrote slowly, and, like the heroine of New Grub Street, did her time in the British Museum Reading Room, grinding articles (‘The Governess in Fiction’, ‘Mary Stuart in Fiction’) out of other people’s books. Original to the point of wilfulness when the impulse to poetry came, she seems, with these prose contributions, to have studied the ...”

“... fit only for the journals of professional organisations, which were formed partly to create new reading audiences. The first specialist society was, appropriately, the Linnaean Society, founded in 1788 around Linnaeus’s remarkable botanical collection, which was purchased for £1000 by James Edward Smith in 1783 and brought to London over the protest of ...”