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“... soul-stripping illness whose details Bayley did not spare. After her death in 1999 things sped up. Peter Conradi’s portly authorised biography was smartly challenged by A.N. Wilson’s slimmer unauthorised memoir, Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, a witty, affectionate, impious account which made disturbing suggestions about Bayley’s feelings towards his ...”

“... came across versions of themselves or their foibles being lavishly ridiculed. During a communal reading of the sixth volume of Sir Charles Grandison, she came to a passage she heartily wished she could avoid. Charlotte’s mockery of Aunt Nell’s treasured but rather pathetic letter-case (containing ‘but a few letters’, and filled instead with faded ...”

“... No one who has read Crabbe’s poetry has ever denied the power of his portraits or his stories. ‘Peter Grimes’, one of the embedded sections of his great work The Borough (1810), is justly famous, and, were it better known, the story ‘Delay has danger’, part of the very uneven Tales of the Hall (1819), would be known for what it is, a masterpiece ...”

“... killed himself over some more private misery, and before he could even have scanned my poor barbs.)Reading Jan Dalley’s very scrupulous if slightly solemn book, I was visited by the same sense of pervasive pointlessness. Here again one encounters teak-headedness and conceit among the overdogs. Here again one learns how vulgar bigotry can be veneered with ...”

“... fingers and hands move – this book shows it. The section on Bach in the set of essays edited by Peter Williams mainly deals with matters of performance in a more conventional way. The most interesting of the essays is by the editor himself, on ‘Figurae in the Keyboard Works of Scarlatti, Handel and Bach’. The problem is that in the 18th century ...”

“... all that was left of the old neighbourhood was a chemical factory. One of his mates at school was Peter Hook, who ended up playing bass in the band; Hook likes to describe himself as an ‘oik’. Curtis was more bookish, and isolated. Joy Division’s music was bleak, full of frustration, fear and guilt. They were produced by Martin Hannett, whose studio ...”

“... who kept body and soul together on a minute stipend by writing facetious novels under the name of Peter Priggins. The Brookes’ wine shop – always known as the Office – was at Folkestone. They themselves lived at Sandgate, a more socially eligible strip of coast to the west. They also possessed an inland cottage at Bishopsbourne in the Elham ...”

“... to give a series of lectures about the Spanish Civil War and about Cuba – he was teaching at Reading University at the time. Chile in 1971, under Allende, was on the brink of something, but no one was sure of what: another Spain or a second Cuba, Franco or Castro. ‘The anxiety, or fear, on the part of the bourgeoisie itself is a factor in the ...”

“... Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’ and Three Philosophers, written in collaboration with Professor Peter Geach, and containing studies of Aristotle, Aquinas and Frege. Her interest in the topic of intention and the teachings of Aristotle reappears in these papers, but they have little overtly to do with either Aquinas or Frege, and the influence of ...”

“... Wordsworth for most would be impossible. To Shelley he seemed ‘a solemn and unsexual man’ (‘Peter Bell the Third’), and even the revelation early in this century that he had a French girlfriend, and French illegitimate daughter, has not altered the stuffy public image of Victorian Poet Laureate and sage of Rydal Mount. If anything can change this ...”

“... were written for Waugh and he liked them. The question that’s hard to answer is: why are we reading them now? The Observer, who serialised the letters, described their publication as ‘the literary event of the season’, which shows a doubtful sense of what’s what. Ann Fleming was married for 12 not very happy years to Ian Fleming, with whom she’d ...”

“... A sweet, elderly man who was maddeningly self-deprecating. George and Mary Oppen told me about a reading in Michigan, at the end of which the audience was on its feet, wildly cheering. Rezi, as they called him, was heard to mumble: ‘I hope I haven’t taken up too much of your time.’ And yet, because of his collaborations from the 1920s to the 1950s as ...”

“... and ‘Lady Macbeth’, written in 1864, is the first. Were you to put the volume aside after reading it you would be misled. The young Anton Chekhov described Leskov as his favourite writer, and you can see a line leading from ‘Lady Macbeth’ to a possible future of Chekhovian prose. A pessimistic-realistic view of human behaviour, transcending class ...”

“... Melbourne tram downtown, stopping only to glance in a bookseller’s window. It was good to see Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore holding its place in the bestseller list. 1 A good cop yarn set in Victoria, stylistically it is West Coast American, and has been received well there. But that’s not why it’s so popular here. The book sets out to ...”

“... Deliquesce.RickSly boy, is how Rick sums it up. He mops his face with a black handkerchief while reading from his memoir and keeps his voice way back in his head so we have to lean forwards. I learned to give tough explanations, he says of old women who lashed questions at him from their dark verandas. He pronounces certain words (sly, tough) as if buttering ...”