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“... Without Richard Norton-Taylor of the Guardian, there would be no Belgrano affair, and doubtless Mr Clive Ponting OBE would be plying his way, ever upwards, in the Ministry of Defence. This is no exaggeration. Simply a statement of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on ...”

“... reason to look for him. The unique degree of Pynchon’s withdrawal from public scrutiny can be read as a refusal to surrender himself to forms of cultural power wherein knowledge of human life has become, in his view, inseparable from the effort to warp and control it, to reduce it to those compulsive plot-makings of which he is himself a master and a ...”

“... this decision is evidence, therefore, of a most important change in his life. But the entry can be read quite otherwise – as marking the perpetuation of his problems and in terms by which he deludes even himself. What sounds like an affirmation of free will is really a denial of it, a determination to thwart it. Can a man be said to believe in free will ...”

“... parody of Henry James is readily and roughly transcribed: for ‘caught in her tone’, read ‘caught her tone’; for ‘feverish’, read ‘feverishly’; for ‘physically’, read ‘psychically’ ... Mis-spelling, mis-punctuation and misquoting are much in evidence. In ...”

“... country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’ – but the exposed whoppers of Richard ‘I am not a crook’ Nixon, George ‘Read my lips: no new taxes’ Bush, and Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton. David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary ...”

“... it, you might find that the work of these painters has, if not rigour, its own sort of integrity. Richard Morphet’s catalogue essay speaks with a fine generosity about the slow, steady, affirmative qualities of their later painting. This sort of pleading won’t settle the issue, however. The exhibition in question was just too big: ‘pleasure’, whatever ...”

“... and carried himself with such distinction that he was called the Grand Duke. To top it all, when I read his diary I discovered he was passionately and very problematically in love with his best friend’s wife. I knew little about his artist son, Richard – C.R.W. Nevinson – apart from his First World War paintings and ...”

“... Who can forget the moment in Chapter Six of Greenmantle when Richard Hannay penetrates the inner apartments of Colonel Ulric von Stumm and, with a thrill of horror, realises that there is something distinctly rum about the chief of Prussian Intelligence: Everywhere on little tables and in cabinets was a profusion of knick-knacks, and there was some beautiful embroidery framed on screens ...”

“... of Ulysses in England. The gist of the whole matter is that the editions which most people read, the Penguin ‘reprinted with corrections’ in 1971 and the Random House Vintage Books edition, ‘corrected and reset’ in 1961, are about equally erroneous: seven errors to a page, according to Professor Gabler’s count. Some misprints are common to ...”

“... books for knockdown prices – because they were in Latin, and neither sellers nor buyers could read them. Somewhere, for instance, a shabby, undistinguished-looking copy of Guglielmus Harveius, De motu sanguinis is probably lurking – last copy sold at auction, £80,000. Latinity has largely vanished from the world. What people forget is how long it was ...”

“... in 1960 whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a book they would want their wives or servants to read. The jury – which included three women – is said to have laughed. Its acquittal of Penguin on a charge of violating the newly minted Obscene Publications Act 1959 is widely regarded as a turning point in the centuries-long persecution of literature and ...”

“... a review of autobiographies by Evelyn Waugh and Leonard Woolf. On the pretext that ‘no one can read an autobiography which describes a time, a country, a class familiar to him without starting to compose his own,’ Auden turned this into an 11,000-word comparison of his and their lives, under a series of headings such as ‘school’, ‘events and ...”

“... might nominate Trakl, Laforgue, Keats and Shelley (I don’t think I breathed while I was reading Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The Pursuit all those years ago); for a rare, artful blending of long and short, one can’t do better than Rimbaud and Hölderlin; and for the latter, Hamsun, Yeats, Shaw – and Bunting. Incidentally, or maybe not, Bunting also shows ...”

“... Hutton was justified in complaining that hitherto the history of the ‘English Revolution’ has read like ‘a marvellous story with the last chapter missing’. This is so no longer, but what does it tell us about ourselves that we have allowed the concept of ‘revolution’ (itself a French import) to excite us so much that we do not attempt to study ...”

“... a short step to the triple breakthrough of 1595, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet and Richard II. The combination of a learned and allusive style with the indulgent mockery of a schoolmaster who enjoys the friendly patronage of a king proclaim a writer at ease with his own educational capital and the position it may earn him. As it turned ...”