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“... made me think of writing about him – just as when a few years ago I thought of writing about Kafka, what started me off was a joke that Kafka had made on his deathbed. Dying of tuberculosis of the larynx, he was fetching up a good deal of phlegm. ‘I think,’ he said (and the joke is more poignant for being so ...”

“... fashion, by simply recounting the circumstances of an assault, the victim becomes the culprit. In Kafka (about whom I had written) it is almost a commonplace, the lesson (and this is in Kafka too) now written on my own flesh. Just by telling the story one loses the facts, shakes them out and makes them available for ...”

“... mouse. Shy she may have been but no mouse, and one who got her own way, in this lining up with Kafka and Simone Weil, all three of whom mobilised assistance by seeming helpless.30 July, Yorkshire. Good exchange with Will Dawson, the young farmer who on Saturdays helps in the village shop. Rupert buys a box of matches. Will: ‘No history of arson, I ...”

“... much to be thankful for in his correspondence with Maeve and Monica. ‘One could say,’ wrote Kafka, ‘that all the misfortunes in my life stem from letters ... I have hardly ever been deceived by people, but letters have deceived me without fail ... not other people’s letters, but my own.’ So it is with Larkin, who as a young man took the piss out ...”

“... of history, which again is unappealing. What they both lack, Akhmatova in particular, a touch of Kafka. Had I known about this meeting twenty years ago I might have thought of making it a companion piece (or a pendant, as they say in art history) for An Englishman Abroad, an account of another Moscow visit, though the Berlin-Akhmatova encounter furnishes ...”

“... own kind of novel. She argued against the heavy, mercantile realism of Edwardian novelists such as Bennett and Galsworthy, writers who, it seemed to her, only notarised their characters by listing their clothes, incomes, houses. Bennett thought that the man Sherlock Holmes was full of life; Woolf that he was a sack stuffed ...”

“... by Shakespeare’, but in such a way as to make him think of something entirely different: Freud, Kafka, King Hussein, 19th-century photographs, the Rothschilds. Return to Agate’s little essay on Olivier as Macbeth. After his heavy chunk of old Archer, he swings into his modern world of 1936: Perhaps this is the place to say – and if it isn’t I shall ...”

“... both these grounds, he is mistaken, for we have only to recall Derrida’s elaborate readings of Kafka, Geoffrey Hartman’s of Christopher Smart, or Barbara Johnson’s of Zora Neale Hurston, to see how much analysis of text and modification of the canon have gone into deconstructive theorising. But why should Steiner, who wants to replace commentary with ...”