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“... writers believe too much in what they believe,’ she once told me – as well as what John Lanchester once identified as a ‘Russian horror of clarity’. It’s not that she doesn’t like clear prose, it’s just that she prefers it when writers don’t use that prose to know, in advance of knowing, what they think about everything, or to ...”

“... he would have preferred the indignation with which some Americans greeted his portrait of Daisy Miller or his study of Hawthorne, for example, to the ‘deathly silence’ with which works like The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Casamassima (1886) were received by the public. H.G. Wells’s satirical attack on James in Boon (1915) was another ...”

“... syllabus-implications which make Dr Stephen’s whistle-stop tour from Chaucer to Arthur Miller look somewhat outmoded. And, in view of the fact that these criteria bear Sir Keith’s seal of approval, one should perhaps be wary of accepting too readily the ‘left-wing’ label which has been attached to the ILEA’S policies on race, gender and ...”

“... on, HMS Pinafore is still afloat. Refitted and relaunched by directors like Joseph Papp, Jonathan Miller, Ken Russell and Mark Savage as post-copyright, post-D’Oyly Carte G&S, not only Pinafore, but The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and Princess Ida too have been successfully revived on both sides of the Atlantic. Showbusiness professionals now admire ...”

“... men and women. Well, Forman may have been a one-off city goat, as his contemporary the Italian miller Menocchio, recorded by Carlo Ginzburg, may have been a one-off village sceptic; but you can’t deny that he provides a heap of evidence about the penchant for adultery of Elizabethan wives. And just as Rowse’s speculations about Emilia Bassano were not ...”

“... of its good and bad angels, the authoritative and the authoritarian. Linguistic conservatives like John Simon, who sometimes seem not only not to mind being disliked but to thrive on it, do not shrink from such acts of authority as will promptly be branded authoritarian – a word wielded in Sidney Greenbaum’s tour de task-force The English Language ...”

“... it derives somewhat from Yeats and from Eliot, and in this country friends of mine, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. And a rather strange position was built up. There were great arguments that poetry was a form of knowledge, at least as valid as scientific knowledge, and in certain ways more so, because it didn’t abstract from experience. We claimed any ...”

“... us.’ From here on the letters become even more ardent; about two-thirds of those selected by John Tyrrell are from the last 15 months of the relationship. Janácek went on to explain more about his feelings to his wife, and wrote to Kamilá that he felt things drawing towards a decision. She wrote back to him: ‘I’ve not longed for anything else, my ...”

“... left’? Until the birth of the English Stage Company, the post-war British theatre was, as Arthur Miller has said, ‘hermetically sealed off from life’ – and from the American theatre. When Look Back in Anger was produced Miller had written Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge and All My ...”

“... of the Smith resolve), he met a young milliner, Anne Longden. She was the daughter of a local miller, far beneath him in fortune and rank. He made her his mistress, and Barbara Leigh Smith was the first of the five children she bore him. He did not marry Anne. The more fastidious Smiths including Florence Nightingale’s well-to-do parents, were never ...”

“... shows a mill being brought back into use under the eye of God the Father. Christ is emptying St John’s eagle out of a sack into a hopper to join St Matthew’s angel, St Mark’s lion, St Luke’s ox and St Paul with his sword. They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the ...”

“... How I got into this. John Sturrock called from the LRB. He knows that I like opera a lot, and that I now and then get tired of writing papers about the mind/body problem for philosophy journals. ‘Would I like to report on the new pop version of Aida? (Elton John, Tim Rice and, rumour has it, a transparent swimming-pool ...”

“... John Sturrock’s little book is the best single guide to its subject that has yet appeared. Structuralism and Since demands, though, that its title be taken literally. It traces, technically and without concession to idle curiosity, the course of ‘structuralism’ in its modern phase – from the moment when it achieved new importance in the work of Lévi-Strauss in the early Sixties, through its development and extensions in the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, to its present position, which is known either as ‘post-structuralism’ or simply as ‘deconstruction ...”

“... One of the more extraordinary revelations in A Better Class of Person, the first volume of John Osborne’s memoirs, was the fact that the author was proposed as the leading man in the 1948 film The Blue Lagoon. The teenage Osborne by his own account had a hollow chest and acne, and a loin cloth would not have shown these off to advantage; the opportunity to loll among the palms with Jean Simmons went to the Welsh actor Donald Houston ...”

“... On 16 June 1953 an administrative session of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society passed a vote of no confidence in its President, Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s theory was at war with internationally-dominant trends in ego psychology. His short analytic sessions took liberties with practices that others saw as sacred. And in relations with colleagues, Lacan disturbed the peace by insisting that traditional psychoanalytic societies undermined psychoanalytic truths ...”