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“... a slasher – though there is a very severe notice of the autobiographies of Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell – and he seems to enjoy being generous to other reviewers, as when he justly praises John Updike. He is full of gratitude to literary editors, commemorating Ian Hamilton’s work on the New Review in terms only this side of idolatry. Such writers ...”

“... up the consensus. Yet it was a growing popular consensus that the alternative, Private Eye-reading, TW3-watching, Holland Park-dwelling establishment deserved a turn on top, that gave Labour its 1964 victory, and Benn his first taste of office. This volume covers the strange episode two decades ago when Labour was not only electorally successful but ...”

“... Nor do readings of the past and divinations of the future of a particular life much resemble reading a poem or a story. There may be a passing resemblance to reading in the recollection and arrangement of personal disasters and pleasures now gone by, yet likely to have a foreseeable effect on the future. And musings of ...”

“... book, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984), was a painstaking re-creation of the life of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. He topped that with an account of Fred and Rosemary West’s killing careers, Happy like Murderers (1998). The first resembles a documentary; the second is more like a novel in the sense of being more artfully shaped and ...”

“... name four. I had the impression he was slightly demented himself. He stumbled a few times while reading the Last Rites and we got the giggles. He left, and my father continued rattling until the next evening and then the breathing really did stop.We put a wild flower from the garden in his hands and folded them on his chest. His fingers were the same colour ...”

“... To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it. I no longer have collaborators. I used to be envious of them. They repel those readers whom I want to lose myself. From a torch something drops occasionally. A little lump of pitch. Die Fackel (‘The ...”

“... no coincidence that the first objects that fall from the incised stomachs of captured sharks in Peter Benchley’s Jaws are car parts: as Benchley points out at the novel’s outset, like some grotesque über-car the great white must perpetually keep moving. My sister then held up as evidence The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, in which ...”

“... We were all friends, I suppose. You may not remember Graham, but he was Maureen’s first husband, Peter and Jill’s father . . . you do, that’s good. They were Surrey people: they had a grand house in Caterham. Graham was a rich fellow, talented, energetic, generous; he’d made most of his money as a printer: he published the daily stock exchange ...”

“... for patrons and lesser talents. To fund the Sierra reinhabitation, as Snyder saw it, he took on reading tours and an academic position at UC Davis, fifty miles down the road near the state capital, Sacramento. He called his land Kitkitdizze, after the Wintu Indian name for the aromatic shrub known as bear clover. Sliding down the electric window of the ...”

“... need or want the money. It’s harmless enough but it makes literature a nastier world. 8 January. Reading Zachary Leader’s biography of Kingsley Amis, though not with much relish. She was ‘a good drinker’, Leader says of the Swansea original of Mrs Gruffydd-Williams, and while one feels this is very much an Amis-type judgment, it’s not one Leader ...”

“... way in which a word, an image, a dream, a story, calls up another, connected yet independent’. Reading the quintet, one is unsettled by a reality for ever melting into fantasy only to harden back into new reality. And in Lying together we learn that the original point of departure – the writer leaving for an assignation with a blind interpreter – was ...”

“... study became ‘serious’. For a long time poetry left Murray unmoved, though he does remember reading all of Milton in a single long weekend. Somewhere late in his schooling a door opened. He mentions in one place help he received from a skilful teacher of English. In another he describes something like a moment of revelation ‘one evening in the ...”

“... much exaggerated, isolated cases of boyish high spirits’ – at times it has been like reading the Leeds United programme notes explaining away the latest blighted fixture. No, says James, look at the Repton excavations, with their revelations of careful, organised plundering and, one might add, of violent death and probable post-battle killing of ...”

“... four that afternoon. Now, on a hot, sunny, blue day I remember how precarious the talks had been. Reading an article in the Daily Telegraph where David Trimble concludes his argument for a Yes vote by saying ‘we must have confidence in ourselves to face the future, not use the troubles of the past as a comfort blanket,’ I wonder how many Unionists will ...”

“... which is awaiting it upon the cinema screen. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and William Peter Blatty’s Legion (‘The sequel to The Exorcist’) very neatly illustrate this parting of the ways. If Susan Hill’s ‘ghost story’ is not a pastiche, it is undoubtedly an essay in recreating the almost exhausted genre. We are back in that indefinable ...”