“... the Upper East Side. His son Jared, an art student specialising in industrial sculpture (the next Richard Serra, even), started to make it his home. Young Jared took pleasure in the neighbourhood, dirty and dangerous as it was, with homeless people and intravenous drug users camping out in Tompkins Square Park, and was surprised when a contingent of ...”

“... on Primrose Hill, and so almost a sympathetic figure.15 April. Thinking to have something to read in Yorkshire I send out for the new Philip Roth biography, but it’s so heavy I decide it will be too much to carry. It ought to come with wheels and a lectern. Having it on one’s lap is numbing, ironically in view of its subject. The blurb describes the ...”

“... percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long and ...”

“... Endowment for the Arts that over the previous 12 months almost 92 per cent of American adults had read no poetry at all. What role, I wondered, can poetry play in such an environment? I had in mind something like Allen Grossman’s admission that he is uncertain what poetry ‘can now mean in the context of the actual human task’. But Seidel simply ...”

“... and had a particular attachment to George VI. When he travelled to America he would take Wisden to read on the plane. He carried on reading (only) the Times right throughout the 1940s when it was vitriolically anti-Labour, saying that he found its political opinions so predictable they were ‘restful’ and that anyway the main thing was its cricket ...”

“... in the older book was preceded by a mere twenty or so pages of background, but here we have to read something like two-thirds of a four-hundred-page book before we get to this decisive landmark, the work that took Glass out of the garrets and galleries of downtown Manhattan and put him on the world stage. This material is important, not only because it ...”

“... daily ‘hair of the dog that bit me’ basis. We should have known, of course. We were warned by Richard Rorty in 1998: Something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky ...”

“... cultural world. The other implication of ‘experimental’ is that the writing is hard to read, or at least less than straightforward. Quin’s novels don’t make concessions to her readers, it’s true, and in this she is following a tradition that runs from Djuna Barnes and Joyce, say, through Henry Green and Beckett and Robbe-Grillet to Burroughs ...”

“... doctors who met her published the most intimate gynaecological accounts of their discoveries. Sir Richard Manningham reported that he haddiligently search’d the whole Vagina, and being well assured that that time all was clear from Imposture, I touched the Os Uteri, which was close and contracted in such manner that it would not receive so much as the point ...”

“... and that ‘almost every character is real’ – his sole invention being their pursuer, Richard Nayler, mockingly saluted by James, duke of York, as ‘our regicide-hunter-in-chief’.The New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe ...”

“... by the Palestrina Choir in Dublin between 1898 and 1901. It also informed the revivalist work of Richard Runciman Terry after he became responsible for music at Westminster Cathedral in 1901. Terry clearly agreed with Bordes when he wrote that ‘modern individualistic music, with its realism and emotionalism, may stir human feeling, but it can never create ...”

“... to the canon, and that whatever was written in the past had also to be printed, circulated and read. The New History is a move in this same, less exclusive direction: away from the merely singular, whether works of genius or authors, and towards whatever is representative in literature, of a time, a milieu, a genre, a creative kin-group – towards what ...”

“... Spanish population was officially illiterate and probably the same proportion again could barely read. In effect, a cultural revolution, it was brought about by an exiguous minority of mainly middle-class origin born around the turn of the century, and it preceded and coincided with the political attempt to modernise Spain under the Republic of ...”

“... Marcel Raymond, and then soon after, of Georges Poulet, Albert Béguin, Jean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Starobinski and Gaston Bachelard, I am reminded of a passage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Marcel Raymond I read first in the English translation, published in 1950, of De Baudelaire au Surréalisme. It became ...”

“... typescript takes me back to my desk. Here is the eminent re-editor of the Oxford Apocrypha, Richard Proudfoot, arguing that Edward III’s Shakespearean. Oh best and wisest OUP editors, who think even Timon collaborative, reconsider this play, and do not leave it outside the canon, doomed to be read only by ...”