“... Wyndham Lewis saw his mission through, including a caricature of Arnold Bennett under the name of Samuel Shodbutt, here in discussion with his wife: ‘I never read more than the last page. Balzac said he knew what a book was like without even opening it. I can’t say that – that’s more than I can claim – I take off my hat to Balzac! He was a ...”

“... academic and national, to preserve his independence; he was sometimes in the wrong (he baulked at Beckett) but never stiff in opinions. He was certainly worth his salt. The literary world in which Garnett played so central a part is the subject of John Batchelor’s book. Ours was born of it, but there is no very strong family resemblance. A few writers still ...”

“... could give the Novel its generic power was psychological exactitude, especially in the hands of Samuel Richardson. Before Pamela and Clarissa, the term roman referred, he wrote, to ‘a tissue of fantastic and frivolous events which presented a threat to the taste and morals of its readers. I should like another name to be found for the works of ...”

“... not varied – with a pathos so homely and total that it brings tears to the eyes. Beckett and Pinter have nothing on Patrick Hamilton at his best: in fact, beside him they seem as mannered and as formulaic as the Jacobean dramatists do after Shakespeare. Patrick Hamilton is not exploiting urban boredom, or making it witty: it just comes up in ...”

“... Waiting for Godot ends. For – as the revisionists point out in their third major argument – Samuel Beckett’s plays changed the vocabulary of theatre, while Osborne’s play is, formally, surprisingly conservative. Look Back in Anger is a three-act drama, in a single domestic setting, in linear time. The play’s mode is essentially ...”

“... On 15 June 1794, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, prodigious, garrulous and chubby, his brilliant undergraduate career in tatters, set out from Cambridge in the company of a steady companion called Hucks, picturesquely intent on a walking tour of North Wales. Their route took them through Oxford, where they looked up one of Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey ...”

“... was Orwell’s forte, a leitmotif of his fiction. For him, it was what was real, as it was for Beckett. All of his fictional protagonists are humbled and defeated; and while this may be arraigned as unduly pessimistic, it was not the view of the world they taught at Eton. Besides, as Hitchens himself has insisted (ironically enough in light of his own ...”

“... social change. Marina Warner‘Is it not better to abort than be barren,’ a line that Samuel Beckett writes in an early poem, ‘Cascando’, has stuck in my mind over the years, for its harsh intransitive use of the verb ‘abort’. The line had a terrible ring, yet it also interested me that the sentence – almost a motto – is assuming ...”

“... it’s in Russian.’ But she stays in America. I once saw, in Germany, a small exhibition of Samuel Beckett’s correspondence with his German publisher. Many brief note-cards were arranged chronologically, the last written only a few months before his death. Beckett wrote to his publisher not in German but in ...”

“... reasons for withholding, not having thought of it until now)’ is every bit as unaccommodating as Samuel Beckett’s ‘and for other reasons better not wasted on cunts like you’. Voltaire regarded the short tale as a duel with the reader, and a form of complicity. He went out of his way to disparage the ‘littleness’ of the form, and to ridicule ...”