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“... the next few years in various other essays and reviews, the best of which are brought together in Mark Blacklock’s new edition of the journalism. Ballard’s view was that science fiction should get over its ‘juvenile’ fixation on outer space and concentrate instead on ‘inner space’ – an imaginative zone where ‘the inner world of the mind and ...”

“... in his own life between the working-class boy from Hebden Bridge and the glory to which he rose: ‘He spoke of his miner father coughing up his pneumoconiosis in the next bedroom to himself at home and of the 18 constituents who had died when their cage crashed in carnage to the bottom of Markham shaft the previous August. We were of an age and we ...”

“... became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it’) has of course left its mark here as elsewhere, notably in the form of one-way systems of the kind Birmingham recently took to their logical conclusion when the city was turned into a race-track. But despite all the free demolition work by the two rival firms, the Seventies have dealt ...”

“... out, and was replaced by another, much more mystical and occult, as one sees from the Salon de la Rose + Croix. Goldwater makes some fine distinctions between Symbolism and Art Nouveau: there are similarities of line, but Symbolism alone has the characteristic tension between the idea and its embodiment. ‘Every object is finally only an Idea ...”

“... parade of objects and incidents: a chariot drawn by mice; a crown cut into the turf of the lawn to mark the Emperor’s sleeping-place; palaces of spun-sugar (a pastry-cook was one of his companions in exile) consumed in silence by a group of courtiers in mildewed silks while rats fight under the floorboards. Curiouser and curiouser. Napoleon himself makes ...”

“... mind is the great poem of winter’, demanding the destruction of ‘romantic tenements/Of rose and ice’. But it is also the poet who seems, as one turns the pages of this volume, to have been preparing all his life for the phrase ‘fire-tangled’ which appears at the end of the poem I am about to quote. ‘These comic colors dangled down,’ we ...”

“... holding everyone up, waiting for the tide on the Thames to turn: she knew that when the water rose, boats wouldn’t be able to pass under London Bridge, so no one would be able to take her to the Tower that day. Elizabeth writes that she has been her sister’s most loyal subject ‘from the beginning, and will be to my end’; she sensibly scores out ...”

“... self-impressionists, veracious and subtle (Proust, Woolf), ventriloquists and counterfeiters (‘Mark Rutherford’, the pseudonym used by William Hale White, and, you could add, Edward FitzGerald), foreshadow current developments in autofiction, in which memory acts become, as the filmmaker Chris Marker put it, ‘the lining of forgetting’, where ...”

“... out of your life carries less of a stigma than lager or Grand Theft Auto. It’s understood as a mark of educated cultivation, not wilful indulgence or evasion. Yet reading, like every other exercise of the imagination, can be abused, can turn into an addiction. The connection between this and other kinds of abuse is something that Peter Rushforth has been ...”

“... decade. At the very mention of their hero’s name, the pinstripes on the government benches rose like a lot of Pavlov’s dogs. ‘Will the honourable gentleman give way?’ Fred ploughed on. The cries of ‘give way’ intensified. He looked around, his eyes alighting upon Jason Joslin – J.J. to his friends – a smug young man of modest origins who ...”

“... enables Bibliophobia’s signature trait, which is its rapid vaulting across centuries of mark-making. Take the short span between pages 28 and 35. Cummings notes that in the Heroides, Ovid’s rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope writes Ulysses a letter, saying don’t write back, just come. This relationship between writing and presence takes us ...”

“... customer, she’d take the latest romance to the counter to be stamped (later she’d inscribe her mark on the back endpaper – she didn’t want unwittingly to take the same one out again, thus wasting her fee). In her shopping basket her swag, swiped furtively from the shelves, would be buried under the groceries. It was difficult to know what to do with ...”

“... with the staple industries stagnating and over two million people out of work, Harold Macmillan rose in the Commons to press for a radical policy of industrial reconstruction and public investment. What, he asked, were the arguments against public capital expenditure? ‘What is the case of the Treasury, the people who really govern England from the Box ...”

“... seemed to me a small watercolour belonging to Tate Britain, entitled – usually with a question mark – Los and Orc. Identities, even if here the two names from Blake’s mythology seem to apply, are difficult. Let us agree to call Los the figure of imaginative and political energy in human history as Blake conceived it, and Orc that same energy taking ...”

“... Lewis, nursing his obsessive and in some ways unspeakable grief for his lost daughter, with Joe Rose, with Leonard Marnham, with June Tremaine, and with Briony in Atonement, of whom McEwan writes that she felt she lacked secrets, and could not have an interesting life without them. ‘The distortion of a text,’ Freud says in Moses and Monotheism, ‘is ...”