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“... lack certain of the most important early sources: Herbert Croft’s Love and Madness (1780), John Broughton’s edition of the Miscellanies in Verse and Prose; by Thomas Chatterton (1778) as well as the books by Dr Jeremiah Milles and Jacob Bryant. In these (often amazing) Early Sources and Responses, the oddly neglected subject is Chatterton and his ...”

“... he was a Princeton undergraduate (as I was almost fifty years later) with F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop, at a time of what seems now like relatively uncomplicated Wasp hegemony there and in the arts generally. His ties with that university remained deep, not only through his literary friends, but also through Christian Gauss, the ...”

“... writings – she thought of herself, then and later, primarily as a poet – were works of what we’d now call feminist literary history. But to be put in any subcategory was always vaguely affronting. Her horror of dependence on men went hand in hand with a distaste of almost Naipaul-like intensity for anyone who found strength or comfort in ...”

“... loved the first idea; the second, he tutted, was not ‘up to the Plomley standard. Indeed, we picture all the fat listeners on this island writing rude letters to complain of such a broadcast.’ Plomley wasn’t necessarily wrong, just ahead of his time, as Room 101 (1994-2018) and two decades of fat shows (The Biggest Loser, Shut-Ins: Britain’s ...”

“... I went up to Oxford, and featured a jolly song supposedly counselling against nostalgia called ‘We Said We’d Never Look Back’, any three bars of which bring back memories of what I most disliked about those times. Now it is back in the West End, and its revival coincides with the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s ...”

“... the numbers involved, a rank shift had occurred in certain hearts and minds. The Kentish gospeller John Newman explained the matter to the turncoat bishop of Dover, Richard Thornden. He and his fellow gospellers, he declared, had drunk too deep of the teaching of the Edwardine reformers to renounce it simply on command. For, he told Thornden, their doctrine ...”

“... servant, conducts him to an upstairs room, where he’s soon fast asleep, primed for nightmare. We never do find out what happened to the cup of tea. Before long, Heathcliff, shaken out of an uneasy rest by Lockwood’s terror, has attempted to hurl himself through the open window in pursuit of the phantom, before exiting in a more orthodox fashion via the ...”

“... voice, grotesque and solemn at the same time’. When Ceausescu of the Swiss bank accounts sings, we feel sick. When Thylle, ten long years in the Lager, sings, we weep. It is a reminder that the Communist tradition has left its imprint deep in the souls of many different people from many different countries, and that those ...”

“... about a hundred and fifty from 16 different nations. Early on Friday morning, while still sleepy, we were invited by our soldierly hosts to attend a ceremony. It was only when we were walking up the steps to the monument that one of these greenjackets told me that I was expected to lay a wreath, on Britain’s ...”

“... it is believed, whether sensibly or not, that money is somehow real and credit merely imaginary, we, who largely live on credit (mortgages, credit cards etc), could claim with Wallace Stevens that our whole life, whether we are reading or writing poetry or applying for life insurance, is an affair of the imagination. As a ...”

“... turned up in 1974, and kept Christopher both amused and busy translating his poetry into English. John Silber, who later became a reactionary megalomaniac (first as president of Boston University and then as failed gubernatorial candidate), was at that point a brilliant and progressive dean of the College of Arts and ...”

“... from the strong women who serve as senior members of my White House team.’ ‘Sometimes, we complicate policy and processes so much that busy women don’t have time to sift through it all and figure out how it really matters to their lives,’ the Republican communications director said in 2003. ‘We are always ...”

“... Blackwood’s life-in-its-time is of more interest than her work. These days biography sells, and we may be moving to a point where fiction is seen to be no more than a useful biographical resource. Blackwood’s Lady-Carolineness, her unhappy childhood, busy sex life, connections to major figures in art and literature, and gaudy drinking does make her a ...”

“... I am reminded of a radio interview in which the ultra-conservative cleric Edward Norman, then dean of Peterhouse, tried unsuccessfully to cajole the Reverend Ian Paisley into a declaration that liberalism was the root of all evil. Paisley was not to be budged from his own hobbyhorse; of course liberalism was an abomination, but popery, he thundered, was ...”

“... John Berger’s selected essays run to nearly six hundred pages, yet that is just the tip of the iceberg if one looks at the totality of his published work: the essays and reviews about the visual arts – drawing, painting, photography, film – but also short stories, journals, screenplays, travel articles, letters, television scripts, translations, novels, poems, even a requiem in three parts which gives a wrenching account of the untimely deaths of three of Berger’s neighbours ...”