“... where Styron had been briefly employed – ‘I asked Diarmuid Russell to let me be the first to read Guy Davenport’s novel,’ he writes to Blackburn. ‘I stayed up for seven hours last night reading it, and I think it’s an overwhelming, sorrowful, beautiful job of writing, and I frankly went to bed at 5.00 in the morning disturbed, shaken and humble ...”

“... good at it too (his letter to his daughter about how to write an essay is the best thing I’ve read on that ticklish subject). Having said that, he is also aware of his tendency to gravitate towards the glib or the showy (‘War is war and sometimes I think peace is too. Damn, there goes an epigram’), and often takes care to guard against it (‘didn’t ...”

“... her to the attention of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds ...”

“... these notes without knowing me,’ Jacques Derrida wrote in his diary in 1976, ‘without having read and understood everything of what I’ve written elsewhere, would remain blind and deaf to them, while he would finally feel that he was understanding easily.’ If you think you can understand me by reading my diaries, he might have been warning future ...”

“... known as the Inklings, who met regularly in a pub or in college rooms to talk and sometimes to read and discuss drafts of work in progress. The leading members of the group, which included the Anglican writer Charles Williams during the years of the Second World War, also seem to have shared a form of conservatism – one with Tory anarchist leanings ...”

“... to Clive Bell, a number of the Bloomsbury set first heard ‘Prufrock’ in 1917, when Mansfield read it at Garsington: it ‘caused a stir, much discussion, some perplexity’. A short time later Eliot and Mansfield met at a dinner party in Hammersmith (Robert Graves was also present) where, she wrote, Eliot ‘grew paler and paler and more and more ...”

“... on the House of Commons in the 1640s, on which Hexter’s best work was written, though Elizabeth Read Foster analyses ‘The Journal of the House of Lords for the Long Parliament’. There is nothing on Sir Thomas More. Few of the contributors are former pupils. The five most distinguished are neither pupils nor colleagues nor even Americans. A specially ...”

“... seal on Magna Carta and the supporting Charter of the Forests. Carpenter’s two volumes should be read in conjunction with his magisterial edition of Magna Carta for Penguin Classics.*In return, Parliament granted the king the last great tax he was to receive for thirty years. It was Henry’s doing that Parliaments increasingly met at his preferred residence ...”

“... Essays on Freud, once wrote to a friend: ‘I, too, was greatly impressed when I first read Freud. He’s extraordinary – of course he is full of fishy thinking and his charm and the charm of the subject is so great that you may easily be fooled ... so hang on to your brains.’ This is not a piece of advice that all the contributors to this ...”

“... Great Books, that Pale within which critics have comfortably nestled, is that you have to begin to read the obscure books and authors on whose behalf you have been campaigning. (Many of the weariest readers in scholarly libraries at present are feminist historical critics, busily finding the women’s writing to make an entire alternative canon.) Even within ...”

“... of chance can be rigged – but this is not what we are conscious of in reading about Ursula. We read that she intended, in Hamlet’s words, to ‘leave betimes’, and that she did what she intended. That there was a pattern for her in Lermontov’s novel is conceivable: but it can’t be claimed that it fits her with exactitude, or that it provides an ...”

“... growing attachment to Shelley. A typical example, the entry for 9 October 1814, originally read: ‘Mary goes to bed at eight – sit up with Shelley over the fire – get rather in a horrid mood – go to bed at eleven cannot sleep all night.’ With erasures and additions this becomes: ‘We go to bed at eight – get in rather a horrid mood ...”

“... and that this clever robber is ‘perhaps beginning to realise that there is nothing to read there’ – that is, on the boy’s face – ‘that his secrets are all visible, and that she herself contributes to their visibility, to what Merleau-Ponty would call the fragment of being radiating from him within the universal flesh of the ...”

“... photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly reassuring as Warhol ...”

“... replied: ‘Your suggestions on “Water” might be great improvements.’ The poem finally read: It was a Maine lobster town – each morning boatloads of hands pushed off for granite quarries on the islands, and left dozens of bleak white frame houses stuck like oyster shells on a hill of rock, and below us, the sea lapped the raw little ...”