“... The mother’s name, for a start, is Lenore, and therefore, thanks to two famous poems by Edgar Allan Poe (the name features in ‘The Raven’ as well as ‘Lenore’ itself), steeped in death as a set of literary conventions, something that happens in books. The associations are all the stronger for not being commented on – there’s no weary ...”

“... it is only an hypothesis, like any other. The degree of assent you give it may depend on how little or how much the process is complicated by bringing into it the possibilities of human resistance and discrimination with respect to signs. Or it may depend on the degree to which the process is or is not considered unique to this century. Is reality any ...”

“... Browning was Elizabethan in her luxuriance and her audacity,’ Chesterton remarked. Edgar Allan Poe spoke of ‘the fervid rush and whirl of her genius’. Their essays are still the best on her poetry because they respond so fully to her appetite for risk, her dislike of verse that opts for ‘some safe sigh/Cooped up in music ’twixt an oh and ...”

“... in chemistry was nourished by ‘a Home Chemistry set’ in a pink cardboard box that contained little pillboxes of sulphur, iron filings, charcoal etc, and doubtless also – my own memory stirs – of lycopodium powder, a plant spore with pyrotechnic possibilities. It so happened that one of the best-known firms of laboratory furnishers was just by an ...”

“... misprision of the master’s most famous chord progression. At a stroke (or should one say, with a little gentle stroking), the prelude blasphemed against the necessity and the high seriousness of the German musical tradition. It showed that there could be other ways of doing things: different scales, different arrangements of common chords, perfectly ...”

“... The earliest poem collected in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, Alice Quinn’s edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s miscellaneous drafts and fragments, opens: I introduce Penelope Gwin, A friend of mine through thick and thin, Who’s travelled much in foreign parts Pursuing culture and the arts. ‘And also,’ says Penelope ‘This family life is not for me ...”

“... to him had she brought out her second collection. In 1973, 14 years after the publication of The Little Disturbances of Man, he came over to say that she must by now have enough stories lying around the house to make another book; she demurred, then dug through her files, then went back to look again when he assured her she had missed out a couple. Enormous ...”

“... to Roger Shattuck . . . with their romps up and down the glooming critical slopes of the Blooms, Allan and Harold’ – this is a fair sample, unfortunately, of his idea of lively prose. He accepts that post-structuralism, new historicism, queer studies and all the other movements he bundles together as Theory have done some good. They have made us more ...”

“... or need to choose between them. In 1989, at the height of perestroika, the TV hypnotists Allan Chumak and Anatoly Kashpirovsky suddenly became enormously popular; their performance involved staring intensely through the screen to direct healing rays at the glasses of water that viewers had been instructed to place in front of their TVs. Western ...”

“... of the Red Death’ (the dead black youth, for instance, lives in the improbably-named Edgar Allan Poe Towers public-housing project). The other image is that of Savonarola purging the luxury of Florence with his burning of the vanities. Wolfe’s novel has been hailed (notably by the Conservative columnist George Will) as the work of a contemporary ...”

“... which specialised in swindlers but later branched out into adultery. This was twenty years before Allan Pinkerton, ‘the Vidocq of the West’, founded his National Detective Agency in Chicago. Vidocq’s Bureau des Renseignements boasted a vast database of file-cards on every known criminal and a team that sounds like a Victorian equivalent of the ...”

“... You can see why a writer might want to tame them. In Cortázar’s ‘Casa Tomada’, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, the house and its occupiers are at war, and the drama lies in the question of who will come out on top. With Herrera, by contrast, there is never any doubt.In distrusting character, or finding it passé, the ...”

“... is that we don’t fully recognise a phone booth as a phone booth until we’ve felt just a little bit sick at the sight and smell of it. The disgust is the recognition. But what exactly is being recognised? Of course, better things do happen in phone booths, at least in fiction. Clark Kent and Dr Who regularly disappear into booths maintained to high ...”

“... a good deal of his life among English-speaking people. He is one of those German authors who are a little in love with the English, more particularly a certain kind of young Englishman of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely ...”

“... Queen Street across the dark belt of gardens; where also, we told each other, there might be sick little boys and their nurses waiting, like us, for the morning.’In Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell about It, Alice Vernon argues the case for an entanglement between the nightmares we are bound to have and the stories we wish to ...”