“... a non-fiction seminar on Wednesday evenings that year and everybody in the class, I think, had read Slouching towards Bethlehem. I had certainly urged them to. Didion made a strong impression, which I tried to catch in a diary I kept back then:A thin, nervous woman, self-protective in manner – legs tightly crossed, arms hugging herself, down and back in ...”

“... the poet had died. Even within the brotherhood of the St Ives group, Graham’s poetry was little read or appreciated. The links between Graham and the painters Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, Karl Weschke and Sven Berlin were forged by his understanding of their work: it was his dedication to art, rather than his ...”

“... widened in alarm: ‘How did you guess?’ On another occasion we discussed Simenon. I had mainly read the Maigret stories; she had mainly read the romans durs, which she greatly admired. I asked her to recommend one. She was, as in everything, quite firm. ‘Chez Krull.’ This conversation must have taken place before ...”

“... art, organised in 1760 by a group calling itself the Present Artists, included work by Katharine Read and the future Academician Mary Moser; exhibitions held subsequently by two rival associations, the Free Society of Artists and the Society of Artists of Great Britain, displayed larger numbers of women. (Both groups allowed submissions in non-traditional ...”

“... inner suburbs, it is one of those books so authentically of its time and place that, once read, it is hard to think of Melbourne without it. The novel also contains an amount of supremely focused writing about sex between Nora and her drug-addicted lover, Javo.As a subject, Javo would have been just the type for the Oxford Anthology – Nora, not so ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy ...”

“... Tory Conference. The clients include other Conservative ideologues such as Michael Portillo and Peter Lilley and a strange breed of suburban Brylcreem boys – John Moore, Kenneth Baker, Jeffrey Archer and, pre-eminently, Cecil Parkinson. What they have in common is a dreadful smarminess, a smoothly blatant insincerity which apparently nothing can puncture ...”

“... mottoes, editorial ‘advertisements’ and much else. It is a striking fact that we can read the series of papers straight through today, though there is no sustained fictional line in the Tatler – merely an assumption of the censor’s role, without even the club setting vestigially present in the Spectator. The authors make a virtue of this ...”

“... to the final scene and hands it over to me saying, ‘This might interest you.’ While I read, he turns to the Times obits, at which he registers disappointment, then to the book page, which provokes a groan ... When I say that I think the Bedlam scene contains some of the most beautiful lines ever intended for an opera, he grants me ten additional ...”

“... careers of pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a tall, apparently ...”

“... is finding out about them. Final Exit, like Spycatcher, is a best-seller in America. Like Peter Wright, Derek Humphry is a renegade Briton. He admits to having ‘assisted’ three of his loved ones exit: under British law he is a serial killer. Humphry confessed to his part in the suicide of his first wife Jean in his biography of her, published in ...”

“... a group of locals, musical and devout. The next, song sheets were handed out, with music few could read, and we were expected to sing along. The New People’s Mass has ever since been rather a grim affair – a dreadful noise in the pits while the faithful work out where quavers go and what crotchets sound like. The change had been made in the name of the ...”

“... la Mare’s poems ‘sound stilted or quaintly vague, that may be because we no longer know how to read him’. Before reading Wootten’s careful and illuminating analyses of the poems, I would probably have concurred with F.R. Leavis who, in 1932, dismissed de la Mare’s work as a ‘belated’ last throw of the romantic dice, offering the sort of ...”

“... the supernatural. From this extraordinary correspondence, which will radically change the way we read psychoanalysis, it is clear that ‘sexuality’ and the ‘unconscious’ were the new, the scientifically prestigious words for the occult: for that which is beyond our capacity for knowledge, for the weird, unaccountable effects people have on each ...”

“... A few months before the publication of Dusklands in 1974, J.C. Kannemeyer reports, Peter Randall, the director of Ravan Press in Johannesburg, asked J.M. Coetzee to consider supplying ‘a few more personal details’ for the jacket of his first novel. ‘We are often criticised,’ Randall wrote, ‘for not telling readers about our authors ...”