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“... naivety – Twombly’s, or possibly their own – and tend to overcompensate for it. Here’s Simon Schama in his introduction to the catalogue for Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper: ‘Twombly’s Apollo is not the fine-limbed hunk of the Belvedere, but the pitiless flayer of Marsyas … what Twombly draws from archaic mythology is its poetic ...”

“... good and bad angels, the authoritative and the authoritarian. Linguistic conservatives like John Simon, who sometimes seem not only not to mind being disliked but to thrive on it, do not shrink from such acts of authority as will promptly be branded authoritarian – a word wielded in Sidney Greenbaum’s tour de task-force The English Language ...”

“... In Simon Raven’s Alms for Oblivion novel sequence, we are introduced to the hopeless young charmer Fielding Gray. His father is remote and sourly reactionary; his mother develops ominous signs of chippiness and puritanism. Young Fielding gets through most of the right hoops but usually in the wrong way. His public school, in other words, is slightly too minor ...”

“... It is a bit brown and the scribal hand is functional, unremarkable, almost ugly. For Simon Armitage the scribe’s letter forms are ‘like crusading chess pieces’, which is a disservice to chessmen. Sometime after it was written, it was illustrated by an artist endowed with exuberance rather than skill. The figures which appear in the spaces ...”

“... of Threevotes; Peter Paypaul Paperstamp, the sinecure-seeking poet of Mainchance Villa; Sir Simon Steeltrap, scourge of poachers on his hunting estate at Spring-gun and Treadmill. Some of the names indicate real-life targets such as George Canning, the Tory statesman who started out as the attack dog of the Anti-Jacobin, and Wordsworth, whose acceptance ...”

“... vigorously that the journals and other descriptive writings of explorers such as David Thompson, Simon Fraser and Alexander MacKenzie were the first contributions to Canadian literature, and these works teem with a sense of the forests and prairies, lakes and rivers as the inexhaustible new land in which settlers had to strive to make themselves at home. All ...”

“... to his life through marriage. Thomasin would bring security; the more striking, passionate, raven-haired Eustacia, another orphan, is more alluring, but her determination to leave the heath for a fashionable city life would require Wildeve to abandon his economic safety and take a risk in the world. Clym, Thomasin’s cousin, is the native whose return ...”

“... like silence,’ it begins) was released in 1965, on Bringing It All Back Home, the same year as Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Sound of Silence’, which includes the line: ‘The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.’ I don’t know which was written first, or if they were written quite independently, and it doesn’t matter – after ...”