“... of Spark’s awareness, converting his own similarly hallucinatory experience into The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Any sudden access of words – Mrs Hawkins’s ‘pisseur de copie’ in A Far Cry from Kensington, the servants’ hypercivilised jabber at the end of Not to Disturb, frugal Lise’s last, terrible brief linguistic extravagance (‘“Kill ...”

“... of culture to enforce gender roles and circumscribe her freedom. In a now classic letter to Susan Gilbert, the close friend who was to marry her brother, Austin, Dickinson expresses her critical vision of the institution of marriage, that empire of subordinate softness which she dedicated her life to refusing: I have always hoped to know if you had no dear ...”

“... of the spirit to the coarseness of a physical touch – an experiment that John Malkovich tried as Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady (1997). Ryan’s monsters are always situated within the bounds of the probable. You can feel the depth of his achievement if you set him alongside two leading actors, Robert Mitchum and John Wayne, who bore a family ...”

“... cack-handed husband. It has literary pretensions – epigraphs courtesy of Voltaire, W.S. Gilbert and Pirandello – and there are suggestions of a darker, more astringent fable shadowing the good old-fashioned satire of suburban life. When he reveals himself, the real psychopath turns out to have madder and nastier ideas about poison than ...”

“... development, distinguishable only by the ghastly Spinnaker Tower, a signature eyesore of bellying white spars that makes Anish Kapoor’s absurd Olympics evisceration, the ArcelorMittal Orbit, look positively subtle. Oh well, no matter, because unlike the poor blitzed Pompey docks, or Stratford marshes, the power station has oodles of authenticity to ...”

“... Cheshire and Scotland, and have other holdings scattered around the world, especially in the old white Dominions. Contemporary estimates of their total wealth start in the region of £100 million, and work steadily – if speculatively – upwards from there. By comparison with many of their landed cousins, who slum it in safari parks, the Westminsters have ...”

“... their French translations. ‘Snotgreen’ = ‘vert-pituite’. He also copied out the so-called Gilbert schema, which lists a governing Homeric parallel, art or science, colour, symbol, bodily organ and rhetorical technique for each of Ulysses’s eighteen episodes, predetermining the way Joyce would approach the narrative. You can sense Queneau’s ...”

“... view of ancient Greek religion as a rather staid, almost statuesque form of cult, with its flowing white robes and strumming lyres. Instead, she exposed beneath the surface a much more violent, ecstatic, even ‘primitive’ (as she saw it) religion, which – she claimed in Themis – was best understood through the lens of Durkheimian anthropology (as she ...”

“... watching his daughter Flavia beneath a ‘dark and contingent cedar tree … sitting on a white wooden seat, in her unutterable otherness, her pet marmoset on her shoulder, her cap of auburn hair shining like burnished gold on her head. Nearer to the house, in the rose-garden, their younger daughter, seven-year-old Perdita, strange, mysterious and ...”

“... she thought, ‘wouldn’t have stuck through thick and thin to the business of making poems’.Gilbert Sorrentino, writing in the pages of her own magazine, described di Prima as ‘too concerned maybe with not being a “lady writer”’: her work, he said, suffered from a lack of ‘gentleness’. (In ‘The Quarrel’ she tells her man that ‘I ...”

“... next thing he did was strangle him with an old tie (after making sure his dog, Bleep, a black and white mongrel bitch, was out of the way). He washed the body and dusted it with talcum powder, then he went back to bed, where he spent the night with Bleep and the corpse. Here in this cell he is still with me. In fact I believe he is me, or part of me. How can ...”

“... call a ‘bibliography’. They get quite excited: ‘The Pothunters. Ten black-and-white illustrations by R. Noel Pocock ... Soon after I estimated The Pothunters at “up to £100” in Collecting Modern First Editions, an American collector offered me $500 for my own copy ... So what is it worth?’ Bibliophiles are like that, always asking ...”

“... My favourite moment in Martin Gilbert’s Life of Churchill is when the Prime Minister is touring the ruins of Hitler’s Chancellery in 1945: In the square in front of the building a crowd of Germans had gathered. Except for one old man who ‘shook his head disapprovingly’, Churchill later recalled, ‘they all began to cheer ...”

“... for the authentically progressive – whoever you consider those to be, from Henry Moore to Gilbert and George – in an English art world that remained through the 20th century recalcitrantly retardataire, forever harking back to Victorian escapism and prettiness. On the contrary, goes the other voice, genuine innovation in England was stymied from the ...”

“... fashion, he attended the ceremony wearing a liqui-liqui (some sort of traditional Colombian white linen suit), with a yellow sunflower in his lapel. In fact, his entourage, all two hundred of them, wore a yellow flower too: in their clothes, in their hair – everywhere. A national emblem perhaps, like the yellow rose of Texas? No, senor. A flowery ...”