“... of the opening sentences of the previous chapter, verbatim. ‘And on it went. When the bell went for morning break I found I’d filled three sides.’ Black Swan Green is in part the story of a stammering poet finding his true voice as a writer of fluent prose. The idea that a novel like this would stream out of a 13-year-old’s pen isn’t ...”

“... scheme for the Carolinas provided evidence of speculative folly much nearer to home. Frederic Henry Hedge, a Unitarian minister in Bangor, Maine, talked in 1838 about ‘bubble constitutions, which burst as soon as blown’, singling out for ridicule Locke’s plan for distinct orders of nobility. The glory of America was that it had not adopted a ...”

“... over thirty of the former and some of them almost fatal. The cost was great. In For whom the bell tolls, which he wrote when he was about forty, he represents the 52-year-old El Sordo as an old man wondering why the prospect of death is unattractive even at his great age. At the time Hemingway still had his most remarkable antics to come, during the ...”

“... Having read some of Henry Brewster’s letters to Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf wrote to Ethel that she found them ‘very witty, easy, well written, full of sparks and faces and shrewdness’, though she admitted that she got ‘a little tired of the lunches and dinners and Pasolinis and Contessa this and that’. Most important, however, the letters lacked intimacy ...”

“... this archipelago of anecdotes about two unhelpful Bolivian servants (‘Adela sometimes takes the bell off the dining table and does not put it back on. Then I cannot ring for her during the meal’) into a more conventional story, though the stereotypes of presumptuous employers and disobliging staff are basic enough to work without the additional apparatus ...”

“... Walpole as an ambitious upstart, heading for a fall. More often, names were gutted or (as Henry Fielding put it) ‘emvowelled’, with dashes or asterisks replacing key letters or every character except the first. This technique had rich potential. It could cast a marketable aura of the clandestine over even quite innocuous texts. Or, as with the ...”

“... in 1788, soon after it was finished, and there is also a small, fine-enamel-on-copper copy by Henry Bone, made ten years later. From these we can see more clearly not only what Reynolds saw, but how Hunter saw himself. He is dressed in the rumpled velvet suit of the intellectual in the privacy of his study. On his table the ink is uncorked; his right hand ...”

“... The cultural strategy of the Reaganite Right was prepared as early as 1976 by Daniel Bell in Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Blame the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s – rebellious students, civil rights agitators, wild-eyed feminists – for the grievous decline in public morality, cultural literacy, educational standards and everything else that has gone to hell: blame them and not, say, the cultural contradictions of capitalism ...”

“... Plath’s is clear from the use of clothes in her own writing. Watt includes a passage from The Bell Jar but not the one where Plath’s narrator, increasingly unable to inhabit the personality she has tried to assume, comes to resent her fashionable clothes, which take on a ‘separate, mulish identity’. One night she throws them off the roof of her ...”

“... compatriots and therefore must, like grown-ups in a playground, endure the chaos until the bell rings, resigned to the fact that this may come long after they are gone’. Watched over by a hyper-protective mother, Khaled is similarly cautious: he has ‘always been a careful angel’, as his father puts it. But one day in March 1980, the family hear ...”

“... at the dry-out clinic. Although rehab scenes have become a ritual in crack-up literature from The Bell Jar to Girl, Interrupted, the very familiarity of the material gives the reader a welcome breather – a leafy break – from the bat-winged frenzy of urban gothic The Black Veil otherwise purveys. Group therapy temporarily bumps Moody’s self-absorbed ...”

“... were born on 13 July 1793, in a thatched tenement on Helpston High Street, next door to the Blue Bell public house. There were two bedrooms and two downstairs rooms: in Clare’s words, his childhood home was ‘as roomy and comfortable as any of our neighbours’. There was an apple tree in the garden, which, Clare says in his autobiography, ‘stood’ his ...”

“... wide/Gone forth, whom now strange meeting did befall/In a strange land.’ Owen’s copy of Henry Cary’s translation of the Divine Comedy indicates that he had read at least cantos X to XV of the Inferno, and it was surely the Dantesque aspects of ‘Strange Meeting’ that drew a belated compliment from T.S. Eliot, who in 1964 described it as ‘not ...”

“... in its range, but it hardly deepened. Joyce, Hardy, Dickens, Camus, George Eliot, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, Byron, Auden, Pound, T.S. Eliot … At 16 I was a chain-reader, on a steady three library books a day when not in school, but my style of reading remained much as it was in my Enid Blyton ...”

“... Kapo – in the 1970s, and all three are now available in English (superbly translated by Michael Henry Heim, Bernard Johnson and Richard Williams). In their determination that the very worst be said, they are grim but not depressing – exhilarating, even. Each novel is quite different in structure and tone; what they share is a radical narrative ...”