“... also left him with a bee in his bonnet about comic books. His younger patients, he observed, liked reading comics, and as far as he could see the medium was a poisonous jumble of will- to-power fantasies, sexualised violence, misogyny, racism and deviant sexuality. He wasn’t the first to take aim at ‘the marijuana of the nursery’, as a columnist for the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... harpy of ‘Bang bang, you’re dead’; the jobs at the Foreign Office, at the Poetry Society, at Peter Owen, that became the jobs written about in Loitering with Intent, A Far Cry From Kensington (1988) and no doubt others. But it skates over many things about which eager beavers may want to know more: Muriel Camberg’s disastrous teenage marriage to Sydney ...”

“... with ‘Berryman’, and deconstructing ‘memoirs’ as ‘me-moirs’. As long as reading the book lasts, it is unnecessary to worry abut modernism, crisis, decline and fall, apocalypse, the death of God, or of the Author. But the serious parts of the book are balanced upon sentiments I think Enright cares about – the desire to attend to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... five-year intervals. It is likely that few but devoted fans could cite them from memory. I am reading from the list at the back of Daugherty’s book: Good as Gold (1979), God Knows (1984), Picture This (1988), Closing Time (1994) and Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man (2000). Unlike Catch-22, the later books all deliver a rich dose of the flavour of ...”

“... with the expression of tightly shut concentration that very small babies wear in sleep.’ I kept reading: how could I not? All that dancing consonance! That deft alliteration! Then came a sentence to choke on, for political, not aesthetic reasons: ‘I was staying with an Oxford contemporary who had bought an estate in the West Highlands … in an idle ...”

“... a longer period if it was ‘within a defined timescale’. This, I reflect, is the best holiday reading, and it flows from the risks Trimble took in signing the Agreement. He then failed to sell it, just as he failed to modernise his party and failed to create a real sense of civil consensus, but this was due to the inadequacy of his party, starved of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... makes readers consider not only a writer’s achievements, but his development. The pleasure in reading the first hundred pages or so of Williams’s lies in watching his style slowly come into being. Because there is so much apprentice work, and because his style finally made such a break with the past, it can be almost unnerving to track the transition ...”

“... to what distinguished each of them. As Brown admits, some of this made for dry and disappointing reading (‘Science as a Vocation’ is ‘one long depressive sigh about what scholarship is and requires, even apart from its miserable contemporary conditions’). But what she finds most valuable in Weber’s ethos, not least in its implications both for the ...”