“... friend of ours’; for Lamb, ‘the animalcule’; Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth took to calling him Peter Quince. Even his friends tended to diminish him: ‘Poor little fellow!’ Carlyle exclaimed to his wife, Jane, who mused: ‘What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk.’ Scarcely surprising, then, that De Quincey was touchy, quick ...”

“... Not having a book on the go I take up again Larkin’s Letters to Monica which I’d tried to read when it first came out but given up. It’s more interesting than I’d thought then but not much more, with too many post-mortems on previous meetings, what he had said to her, what she had said to him and what they had both really meant. The letters date ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... though not much elsewhere. Badly-educated English-speaking philosophers like myself (the kind who read long books in German only if they absolutely have to, non sine ira et studio) owe a great deal to Robert Wallace. He has translated eight hundred pages of very tough German as lucidly as literalness permits. (We also owe a lot to the MIT Press series ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Thaw and de-Stalinisation in the 1950s, believed in socialism with a human face in the 1960s, read the reform-minded journal Novy Mir, had a passionate respect for high culture, and listened to the songs of the balladeers Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotsky on their tape recorders. It’s not a cohort defined by age because the postwar students included ...”

“... in Venice in 1546 contained autobiographical material. These documents suggest a personality which Peter Humfrey in his 1997 study of Lotto described as ‘introspective, hypersensitive, often prickly and quick to take offence; but also generous in his affections, tender in his humanity and possessing a quirky sense of humour’. They also make it clear that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”