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“... their themes and subjects but “around” them,’ Amis has said, ‘and this is very much my sense of it’: Einstein’s Monsters ‘consisted of five short stories around nuclear weapons and an introductory essay that was very definitely about them’. Amis’s latest novel, Yellow Dog, consists of three loosely interconnected plot-strands, each in ...”

“... meant when he said of his brilliant and bizarre version of Guido Cavalcanti’s canzone ‘Donna mi priegha’: ‘As to the atrocities of my translation, all that can be said in excuse is that they are, I hope, for the most part intentional, and committed with the aim of driving the reader’s perception further into the ...”

“... memory of the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across. He did not tell me a single remarkable thing or one that was worth remembering; and yet he was himself so interested in his small marvels, and they flowed so naturally and comfortably from his lips, that his talk got the upper hand of ...”

“... kind: precipitation, bonding and legitimation, functions emphasised by C.S.L. Davies and by S.M. Harrison in his account of the supposedly religionless rising in the Lake Counties. To restrict ‘religion’ in the 16th century to matters ‘spiritual’ and to ‘Catholic idealism’, even to exclude the preservation of monasteries as a ...”

“... the idea, including Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos, and the Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison, who proposed a prehistoric and peaceful woman-centred civilisation in Greece. The discovery of Palaeolithic ‘Venus figurines’, statuettes with exaggerated breasts and hips, seemed to support the notion. D.H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and Rudyard ...”

“... criticism, spoken or written, tends to hug authorial intention rather closely; and writers, in my experience, are often suspicious of the way academic criticism confounds or even nullifies authorial intention in pursuit of the symptomatic. In his new book, After Theory, Terry Eagleton describes two camps, the belletristic and the theoretical. Why is it, he ...”

“... passed the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Bill – known as the Bright Bill, after the MP who introduced it – which increased the maximum penalties for throwing illegal parties: promoters now faced fines as high as £20,000 and jail sentences of up to six months. Specialist police teams like the Pay Party Unit, which was based in Kent but ...”

“... about battle: I’ve only been in that kind of situation where someone’s been shooting at me, a total of about twelve times altogether – in Ireland, in Aden, and we had a couple of dust-ups with the Eoka lot in Cyprus. You get a little bit of headiness out of the situation, you do, because that’s what you’ve been trained for. You don’t feel ...”

“... A tiger in the head or a tiger in the typewriter wouldn’t be rated.The other remark came from me. I can’t remember what provoked it, but Karl was acting forlorn, counting up imagined ways in which his friends had let him down, failed to conceal their scorn for him or edged away in some other manner. I was irritated, and I said: ‘You know, Karl, in ...”

“... the only reason he was feeling better, however. On holiday in Corsica with his Harvard friend John Edsall in spring 1926, he took to reading Proust, and fastened on a passage from A la recherche that released him from his feelings of self-contempt by acknowledging the pervasiveness of human moral frailty – especially the ‘indifference to the ...”

“... stir-crazy after the holiday. We are sitting facing the car park and the row of shops beyond.Me: What is that shop called?R: Which?Me: It looks to me like ‘Hot Faeces’.R: It’s ‘Fat Face’.Between a shop calling itself Fat Face and one called Hot Faeces seems a difference of ...”

“... language of pleasure, which uses words like impact, force, explosive, shock, searing. ‘I find my voice falters in the site of pleasure,’ she confesses, ‘that I have no words for it, that there, I am gagged ... Is saying something violently saying it well? Is feeling something violently feeling it in the only possible way? In a study of the ...”

“... reader, the Norton has gained weight since 1962. (Four kilos is the latest figure, according to my local greengrocer’s scales.) Designed to be read ‘anywhere – in a coffeehouse, on a bus, or under a tree’, its six thousand pages are now too hefty to prop open, let alone carry. The bloating of the seven successive editions registers the Shandean ...”

“... and Walsh admits to having an obsession with his subject. The stamina of biographers often amazes me, and Walsh certainly doesn’t lack it: he has tracked Stravinsky’s movements in minute detail. He marshals his facts into a narrative that, while unpretentiously chronicle-like, is never flat, and he is a stylish writer and sharp analyst of music. His ...”

“... it: ‘It was so delicious and delightful. For those times when I wanted to blank out parts of my life or when I was dealing with some depression, there was nothing better than heroin. Nothing.’ Now she’s in her seventies, she has ‘a protein and vitamin powder’ that she mixes with coconut water and that tastes ‘satisfyingly familiar’. She ...”