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“... who don’t already know the book they came to shop for. If they pause and look, pick up and read, they may also buy. The product and the advertisement are bound up together. Berthold Wolpe’s 1950s Faber cover design for Le Corbusier’s ‘Modulor 2’ Two books are just out which chart the transition from essentially utilitarian, intermittently ...”

“... writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy leasehold, poetry’), in others a rule-book to be torn up (Agard’s ‘mugging de Queen’s English’), in others again a privilege ...”

“... new Glasgow writing’, a movement taken to involve man of pairts Alasdair Gray and poet Tom Leonard as well as Kelman and Galloway, to open on a sort of pen-Polaroid of the city of Glasgow itself. But nothing could be more inappropriate to the spirit of the writing. Turn to the stories collected in The Burn and in Blood: a powerful sense of locality is ...”

“... writer, by which I do not mean a genre writer of cowboy tales like Zane Grey or the younger Elmore Leonard, but that her stories, with only a few exceptions, are situated west of the Great Plains or in Mexico. Berlin herself was born in Alaska and spent most of her childhood in Chile – a setting for several stories. The daughter of a mining man, she also ...”

“... the distance between them can be closed, but the narrator knows differently: He reminds me of Leonard Bast in Howards End. The acute awareness of a social gap and the hope, yet, that the gap can be bridged by enthusiasm and application. He reminds me, painfully, of myself, of times when I was the one in socially asymmetrical situations, in my early years ...”

“... its glass of fashion and its mould of form – was attained by Wolfe himself when he attended Leonard Bernstein’s never-to-be-forgotten cocktail party for the Black Panthers. ‘Radical Chic’ has passed so far into the Anglo-American argot that it may be futile, 13 years later, to attempt to expose it. For one thing, it was so nearly right. Everybody ...”

“... husband, not him her – and even in their domestic life she speaks of ‘John who wifes me. Who Leonard Woolfs me.’ The hated vampirisms of the modernist husbands are never far from her own vampirisms (or her vamping). There’s something dizzying and grotesque in her performance, as she tries to resurrect these women while inadvertently shrouding ...”

“... I knew nothing of New Zealand literature, still less that Sargeson was said to have created it. I read some Frame, but it was the image of Sargeson that kept coming back to me. It was hard to find Frame’s books in Scotland in the 1990s, but it was almost impossible to find Sargeson’s. It took me years to find half a dozen, including two of his ...”

“... seventy pages, though some of them are pictures of sunsets and dawns over water. Iyer’s guru was Leonard Cohen, now a friend, after he went to visit him in his mountain retreat: ‘The sun was scattering diamonds across the ocean as I drove toward the deserts of the east.’ From Cohen, Iyer learned that happiness comes only if you take a ...”

“... to a number of intellectual positions, ranging from ‘All good things come from Africa’ or, as Leonard Jeffries, the outspoken professor of African Studies at City University in New York, put it, ‘Africa creates, Europe imitates,’ to the many who merely maintain that Africans, or peoples of African descent, have made significant contributions to world ...”

“... deeply embarrassing letter telling him how much I admired him’. The letter was intended to be read ‘in the event of my pre-decease’. Even as Bron penned it, though, Evelyn was telling Diana Cooper that he had no plans to fly out to his stricken son – unless the boy died, of course, in which event he might feel obliged to put in an appearance. The ...”

“... Constantin Héger, which Gaskell learned about when she interviewed Héger in Brussels and read Brontë’s letters to him. Any Victorian biographer would have hushed up a matter like that; it was understood to be part of the job. The only question was how it would be done. Gaskell filled some pages about Brontë in Brussels by printing (in ...”

“... proceeds: ‘I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are ...”

“... printout of your novel, will you, Jenny?’ ‘Certainly not,’ she said. ‘But I want to read it. I just can’t lay my hands on it.’ ‘If someone gives you their novel, put it in a drawer,’ she said, ‘and take it out and read it when you can. But don’t lose it.’ ‘But I haven’t lost ...”

“... reading public without which literature cannot exist; and university teachers of literature ‘can read what they like and deconstruct or neo-historicise what they like, but in the classroom they should be on their honour to make people know books well enough to understand what it is to love them. If they fail in that, either because they despise the ...”