“... Even then he thought he was not a writer ‘in the single-minded and consuming sense’ in which Woolf and Hemingway were writers. ‘I have never known / What to do with this that I am heir to,’ Davie wrote in a poem. ‘This’ is Chapel as opposed to Church, English Dissent from the English Establishment. In another poem, Davie evokes ‘the ...”

“... become fairly orthodox to observe – as everyone observes when talking about Schumann or Virginia Woolf or Van Gogh – that Nijinsky’s madness was not unattached to his genius. His choreography is a study in grace and brutality, in his ‘madness’ he invented modern dance, his mind is a set-text in the Jungian analysis of personality, he was fifty years ...”

“... me free …” that sort of thing. But where was God now, with Heaven full of astronauts and the Lord overthrown?’ It’s a question that many have grappled with, including Joni Mitchell, lightly paraphrased here. The lines are from ‘The Same Situation’ on her 1974 album Court and Spark: Still I sent up my prayer Wondering where it had to go With ...”

“... the moment, the wisdom of looking to Spokane for anything at all), we hear the voice of Virginia Woolf, who wrote to her sister Vanessa in 1928 on hearing from Eliot of his conversion to Christianity: I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an ...”

“... period and the identity of characters in the new section – it was 1926, it turned out, and ‘Lord Valance’ was not the Lord Valance of the last section. Even a man’s apparently demented cries of ‘Rubbish! Rubbish!’ were misleading, since he was merely shouting at a dog of that name. These alienation effects ...”

“... names,’ Amis confides at one point, ‘it’s amazing how it lowers . . . the tone’ (Lord David ‘Cess-hole’, for example). Getting the tone down to sewer-level became an end in itself, with much verbal japing along the way: ‘Fucky Nell’, ‘a bit of an R-scrawler’ and so on. Above all, the Amis-Larkin correspondence was an abattoir ...”

“... by her dreadful father – that ‘gluttonous, bibulous, amorous old man’, as Virginia Woolf would call him – who had long since run through the £20, 000 lottery prize Mary had won as a child. Dr Mitford continued to batten on his daughter and she continued to be pressed for money, but the small cottage they shared at Three Mile Cross had become ...”

“... national psychodrama, and that they tend to be a displacement activity. It echoes the loftiness of Lord Reith, the first director-general of the BBC, with its whiff of paternalism; the ‘always’ implies the BBC’s permanence in the pantheon of British institutions.The BBC continues to rank alongside the NHS in the national imaginary, and is still the ...”

“... success nevertheless and reissued throughout the 19th century. In The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf confessed to disappointment: Evelyn was a ‘gentleman of the highest culture and intelligence’, but a diary ought to reveal ‘the secrets’ of the ‘heart’ and he’d written nothing that couldn’t have ‘been read aloud in the evening with a calm ...”

“... for the company of popular female novelists), and they had many friends in common: the Sitwells, Lord Berners, Rex Whistler, T.E. Lawrence. Yet they didn’t meet until they were approaching their forties, and no friendship came of it. Partly this was because they were both conscious of Alfred’s excommunication from the family, which had relegated ...”

“... à la page with the intrigues of various society women, as well as sanguine that the prodigal Lord Arthur will turn out well. As he puts it with airy relish, ‘Bon sang ne peut mentir.’ (In fact, Arthur goes pitiably to the bad, and becomes, against expectation, one of the book’s few touching characters.) A more drastic betrayal is delivered by ...”

“... was often ‘outrageously childish’, deliberately provocative in company, and inclined to lord it over her servants. Widowhood meant life on her own terms. She grew ‘nostalgic and insular’, sour about income tax and the Labour government. Not nostalgic enough, though, to pick over old memories with prying journalists and fans. She never traded on ...”

“... batch of letters she had saved from the flames to her grand-niece, Lady Knatchbull, whose son, Lord Brabourne, had them published – like precious relics – in 1884. A number of other letters have surfaced since then; the great Austen scholar, R.W. Chapman, issued the first modern edition of the correspondence in 1932. Still, only 161 Austen letters are ...”

“... impossible to disagree. (If you were trying to put Christie in the modernist camp with Stein and Woolf and Joyce you would have to argue that her interest in the traditional apparatus of character and narrative was so perfunctory that she was in effect signalling that it didn’t matter and was present purely as a formal requirement – a claim that I think ...”