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“... is how to write and it excites her to think of the flattering request by Christopher Isherwood and John Lehmann for a short story for New Writing. But a day or two earlier she had feelings she described as ‘fiction’, when she had a sudden urge to go to Paris and Leonard said he would rather not. ‘I was overcome with happiness ... after twenty-five years ...”

“... Consciousness has to live, at least notionally, by extremes. It is by turns enthusiastic and cynical, believes and disbelieves. It wants to be snug and comfortable, but its peak moments, when it feels most alive, come out of crisis and extremes – illness, accident, bereavement, jealousy, longing. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,’ it will say to itself about a quarrel or a war, some episode of general misery ...”

“... Henry James writes of a very grand lady that she had ‘an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage’. Paradoxically, the same would be true of the literary personality of Elias Canetti. Behind its approachable modesty, its avoidance of every publicity and image-making process, there is a loftiness, an assurance, a stance of absolute superiority ...”

“... location (a database, a book, the brain of a teacher) to another. Reading English at Oxford with John Bayley had been more like learning to build boats on the river Xingu. There was no obvious method in the way John Bayley taught, and no manipulation. I suspect that being a teacher did not interest him. Talking ...”

“... the darkness’. Then the disease deprived her of the ordinary abilities to function on her own. John Bayley, who had been married to her for more than forty years, had to dress and undress her, feed her and bathe her, reassure her and watch over her constantly to make sure she came to no harm. In its advanced stages when he wrote this ...”

“... Twenty-one years ago, in The Characters of Love, John Bayley suggested that ‘there is a sense in which the highest compliment we can pay to Shakespeare is to discuss his great plays as if they were also great novels.’ At that time, Othello seemed to him particularly (indeed uniquely) responsive to such treatment ...”

“... John Bayley’s new novel is largely about those who are had on, or taken in, and this may well include his readers, who need to keep their wits about them. To begin with, he conjures up a couple of innocents. There was an innocent, too, as hero in his last novel, In Another Country, published in 1955. But Oliver, a young officer with the British army of occupation, was a worrier and a sensitive, risking trouble for the sake of his German girlfriend, and contrasted with his hideously successful rival ...”

“... three most prominent Oxford professors of English since the war have all been populist pretenders. John Carey, scourge of Modernist ‘intellectuals’ and reliable dribbler of cold water on all forms of overheated aestheticism, comes across as the last defender of sensible English decency. Terry Eagleton, with his blokeish binarisms and comic’s ...”

“... for thirteen pence a day. Yet there is an unmistakable authenticity about Housman’s work. John Bayley starts his explorations by emphasising Housman’s pessimism, and this is not a mere set of ideas: it had grown from a personal disappointment deep into the roots of his mind. The Martyrdom of Man (1872) – Winwood Reade’s reach-me-down ...”

“... The critics can be pushed only so far. Having fallen over themselves to praise John Bayley for Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, they were kind, rather, about Iris and The Friends. But now – and this even after Bayley’s appearance with Kate Winslet and Judi Dench on his arm at the première of Iris: The Movie – the cracks have begun to appear ...”

“... Tennyson? This distrustfulness turns up strongly again at the end of the book in a piece by John Bayley called ‘Tennyson and the Idea of Decadence’. There is a great deal to be said for Tennyson; he is quite like Gogol; there is a saving lurking humour or fun in the subtext of some dangerously Parnassian places. (This last discovery aids ...”

“... naming of parts; to Dickinson, the blow of phrase upon phrase, their cause as chancy as their end. John Bayley, the most English of critics, looks for truth by resorting to foreign parts of it. Or by subjecting home truths to the stress of foreignness. Russia and the USA are his main resorts, the one for fulfilment, the other for provocation. But his ...”