“... would take six months, after which I would write an amusing little essay about how we should all read more Zola.* This is not what happened. It took me two years. In that time, I had two books published, wrote another two books, moved from Iowa City to New York, taught myself film photography, became a professor of creative writing and an acquiring editor ...”

“... Karl Ove had prematurely creamed at my entrance. (Don’t worry, we’re safe here: he doesn’t read reviews.)What does the star interrupt? Do people know that they are in the Bible? From the changed sky, modest plagues descend. Turid sees freaky birds with human heads sail through the air; crabs in their hundreds cover the roads; Egil finds a shed skin, as ...”

“... taste. She did not underestimate the stir due to a new Austen work. Well before we could read the play, we could hear tantalising snatches of it in a film which began by re-enacting the Sotheby’s auction – Jane Austen in Manhattan, directed by James Ivory and scripted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Jane Austen’s contribution to the film was ...”

“... new wave of furious proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The ...”

“... the prefaces and acknowledgments were ripped away; if you’d never watched American television or read the US papers; if all you had were the texts and you read them from cover to cover, would you know who Bob Woodward is? No, you wouldn’t, but if you read the jackets, acknowledgments ...”

“... took an interest in literary criticism, history and philosophy as well as society gossip. Richard Steele, the magazine’s editor and a friend of Swift’s, puffed the poet and his work in an introduction. This new writer, he said, deserved to be read and admired because he had ‘run into a Way perfectly new, and ...”

“... to show fear’ – but also glamorous, romantic and politically safe. The novels, still widely read yet less influential in popular culture than that one film, are different. In their relative unfamiliarity we may find it easier to distinguish the melodramatic and the exaggerated from glimpses of the actual era. They portray mid-century America as a place ...”

“... career comes with its own creation myth. He had been making no headway until in 1956 Edith Sitwell read a privately printed book of his stories and, ravished, threw herself into finding him a publisher and an audience. In one version of the event, Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, the book Purdy sent from America to Italy, made the last stage of its journey ...”

“... equally conclusively, that formulations in this relativistic style that have been popularised by Richard Rorty, in particular, simply tear themselves apart. If, as Rorty is fond of putting it, the correct description of the world (for us) is a matter of what we find it convenient to say, and if, as Rorty admits, we find it convenient to say that science ...”

“... figures around the world, including King Hussein of Jordan, President Mobutu, Rajiv Gandhi and Richard Nixon. He is currently on his way to visit ex-President Marcos in Honolulu. He has met Mrs Thatcher several times. Plainly a figure of some significance – and, no doubt, the Observer’s two million readers felt suitably chastened at never having heard ...”

“... the age of 23, during a year spent as assistant master at Reading School under another Jersey man, Richard Valpy. Some months afterwards he took Holy Orders, and, still later, he obtained his BA. Of all the books with which a precocious 23-year-old might burst into print, a standard reference work seems the least likely. Yet Lemprière’s career as a scholar ...”

“... critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a boorish vulgarian’), Robert Gittings (‘unscrupulous’), Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several biographies. In an argument never explicitly ...”

“... in which the leading Whig magnates have been portrayed as industrious, responsible, widely-read statesmen working to a serious reform agenda. Even before Gladstone had committed himself to the Liberal Party – or so many historians now believe – the Whig-dominated Ministries of the mid-Victorian period were pursuing authentically Liberal ...”

“... from the English Faculty Library at Cambridge. It would fall due and I would renew it. I must have read it quite literally hundreds of times – and everyone else not at all! ‘No one shaved, and only the turtle washed,’ as Lowell said of the turtle in the bathtub. I discovered Hamilton, I suppose, and should explain, in the place of honour at the end of ...”

“... the headstone was still blank. He ‘gave the fellow eighteeen pence’ to cut an inscription. It read simply: ‘O Rare Benn Jonson’. Like the portraitist, Jonson’s biographer has to achieve a kind of dual image. He has to convey Jonson’s huge stature, his pre-eminence as a public literary figure, yet also to reveal something of the private flaws and ...”