“... hosts is called Through the Looking-Glass, and its pilot episode features Jonathan Miller and Richard Gregory talking animatedly about mirrors and doubles, both of which figure prominently in A Whistling Woman’s own symbolic repertoire. (As she did in Babel Tower, where she brought on Anthony Burgess as a witness for the defence in her fictional ...”

“... Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually became, not just with Shelley, but with that whole group of English expatriates associated with him, as it moved from Geneva through Italy – Bagni di Lucca, Este, Venice, Rome, Naples, Ravenna, Pisa – shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822 ...”

“... conceded. But they had all been ouflanked. ‘Não é pelos 20 centavos,’ one popular slogan read: ‘It’s not about twenty cents.’ Two million people were on the streets across Brazil, but the MPL, along with other left-wing movements, found itself pushed out. ‘Sem partido!’ the newcomers shouted at anyone bearing any discernible political ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... stories to improve their own influence with the President and to reach him through the papers he read (like the Washington Times). Wanting to ‘let Reagan be Reagan’, Regan battled with the first lady to control the President’s schedule. But Nancy Reagan, as everyone now knows, had a trump in the Presidential protection game, a ‘friend’ who had ...”

“... in government and the media tried to stop the publication of this book so that you could not read it. But now you can. Or at the very least, now you may. I telephoned the publicity department of HarperCollins to inquire who had tried, and how, to ‘stop the publication’ of Newt’s fruits. There was vagueness. I was referred downwards and sideways ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in October, during what the Israeli Army called its ‘incursion’ – a euphemism inherited from Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also ...”

“... It is also a work that only Defoe scholars – and perhaps not all of them – could ever bear to read. Defoe always fancied himself a poet. John Richetti notes that he wrote more lines of verse than either Milton or Dryden, though it is now almost all forgotten. ‘To some extent, that is a shame,’ Richetti observes, not quite believing that he is putting ...”

“... the editor of the Times, soon realised what a talent they had hired: Cockburn had long since read and absorbed almost the entire body of English literature, emerging as a wonderfully fluent and vivid writer. But his salary didn’t come close to paying for his untidy, riotous life in a huge Kurfürstendamm flat, and it wasn’t until 1929 that Dawson ...”

“... until ‘at the end, instead of a picture, you get a perfect blank.’ That ‘blank’ Bangs read, ‘of course’, as Harry’s face – his critique is far from free of the gruesome misogyny you often get from men on the subject of beautiful women. I don’t agree with him. What I see is a disco ball, dark streets, Studio 54 and the Twin Towers, like ...”

“... a challenge, more akin to reading difficult modernist poetry than any novels of this period I’d read – though I had of course already studied Ulysses and Jacob’s Room, both were still seven years in the future when Vainglory was published in 1915 by a writer never once alluded to in my seminars, reading lists or exam papers.Quite naturally, as with any ...”

“... In 1997 I went to hear Ian McEwan read from his latest novel, Enduring Love, at a café in a deconsecrated church in Oxford. The passage he chose was the now famous opening chapter, with its vivid and terrible account of a freak ballooning accident in the Chilterns. Much of the figurative vocabulary is drawn from a mathematical or scientific lexicon – ratio, magnitude, geometry, force, angles, equilibrium, gradient, equation, logarithmic complexity, fraction, variable – and at one point the narrator describes ‘the prior moment’ in the following terms: The convergence of six figures in a flat green space has a comforting geometry from the buzzard’s perspective, the knowable, limited plane of the snooker table ...”

“... he may have been dyslexic, and he was certainly an abnormally bad speller all his life; but he read voraciously, mostly adventure stories, and seems to have enjoyed a rich fantasy life. An unhappy school career, punctuated by expulsion from Dulwich College, ended when he turned 16 and was sent to Germany to learn the wine trade. He was much happier ...”

“... here, just as those of us who can remember pre-decimal days still, I think, automatically read off the records’ figures for money in English, so ‘vj d’ would be converted into ‘sixpence’ without any conscious translation. Even a single word could be macaronic: the hall screens appear in one Cambridge record as leskreneum, a French article ...”