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“... that vast field of inquiry for which Watt’s very title, with or without sceptical quotation marks, remains the usual short-hand designation.’ From the 1980s onwards, attack was the dominant mode of engagement. Parodying the accumulating barrage, Lennard J. Davis wrote that Watt ‘made some really big mistakes’: He thought there was ...”

“... Writing Degree Zero remains a vivid and fast-moving work, full of delicate ironies and marks of affection, and it can still surprise us. On this reading, for example, I was much taken with Barthes’s evident fondness for what he attacks. The classical age (which in Barthes’s sweeping view extends to 1848) is repressive and deceitful, the ...”

“... Fornes had it at her sparky fingertips. As an artist she was the real McCoy, Sontag’s friend Stephen Koch observed: ‘Not a pretend one, and not a critic, and not a discussant, and not a graduate student making notes.’ She was, in short, a natural. When it came to sex and art and many basic day-to-day activities, Sontag wasn’t a natural, being ...”

“... pivotal events of the century, a setting-up of sides for the Second World War. Philby, along with Stephen Spender, Hugh Gaitskell, Naomi Mitch-ison, the American journalist John Gunther and many others, was horrified to see the Austrian regular army shelling the workers’ flats in Karl-Marx-Stadt, and readily agreed with his new Communist girlfriend, Litzi ...”

“... Elizabeth, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, occasionally lapses into dialect, ‘those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel’, Hardy remarks. Corrected speech is one of the things that sets Tess apart from her impoverished family. Hardy’s heroes and heroines are forced to make marriage choices that are sociologically fraught: will the landed ...”

“... where Bloom is Moses the precursor of Christ, the liberator; Parnell is both Moses and Christ; and Stephen is Christ the Hero. However, Joyce’s idea of the Irish nation is inclusive rather than exclusive – it is a definition beyond tribalism, beyond religious creed. And those Irish historians who congratulate themselves on their freedom from tribal ...”

“... 1926 and, as printed, show his early versions beneath extensive crossings-out and between other ...”

“... guilt-imbued and looking for art to heal the wounds of religion, already a version of Stephen Dedalus? By the end of the book, in self-imposed exile, he’s even answering to the name of Stephen.Other ambitious 20th-century American writers have tried to find a way of synthesising the internal perspective and ...”

“... dignified, easy-paced, pedagogic. He instructs, he remembers, he references: books on fire by Stephen Pyne of Phoenix, Arizona; a text called Primeval Forest by ‘a biology guy’ called Chris Maser; articles from the Nation on food stamps. Like many American poets inspired by open-field poetics – the monologues, essays and never-ending exchanges of ...”

“... leftward with stealth candidates. He nominated two seasoned professionals – Ruth Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer – with track records as moderate liberals. If Clinton had played a more provocative game, the Republicans would have responded in kind – ideological warfare, personal attacks and die-hard opposition. And perhaps they would have succeeded: their ...”

“... gone, Vicious either out to lunch or absent without leave, Cook and Jones compliant, the album marks the moment when McLaren emerges as the true auteur of the Sex Pistols. The contents, haphazardly assembled out of archival scraps and sick jokes, are a reflection of his own fixations, not the band’s. The album opens with a portentous orchestral version ...”

“... not only stereotyped and tiresome but dated in a way that Leopold Bloom’s responses to women, or Stephen Dedalus’s don’t seem dated. There is no element of richness or surprise, and there is a terrible ironic distance and jauntiness (more noticeable in The Luck of Ginger Coffey and The Emperor of Ice-Cream). Clearly, the passage quoted above could not be ...”

“... where to place himself. ‘That’ll do,’ said Seamus, laughing into the circus. ‘Top marks.’ After a moment, Karl looked up, quoting from Tam o’ Shanter. ‘Weel done, cutty sark,’ he said. As we walked up to our rooms Karl stopped in the corridor and looked at us. ‘Do I suddenly seem very old and doddery to you?’‘Not at ...”

“... hardly cosy is consoling, too, both of us happiest reading what we know already. 11 October. Stephen Page (Faber) and Andrew Franklin (Profile Books) come round to take delivery of the MS of Untold Stories, a collection of diaries and other memoirs which they are to publish jointly next September. It’s in a big box file with some of the stuff in ...”

“... Foot, Tom Hopkinson (of Picture Post), Tom Harrisson (of Mass Observation), Alastair Forbes and Stephen King-Hall, some of whom became Observer contributors when Astor took charge. But that was years away. In the meantime he started to work for Louis Mountbatten in Combined Operations during the week and for the family newspaper in the evenings and at ...”