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“... the word, or the deed, but the face. ‘Darkness was upon the face of the deep,’ runs the King James Version in the second verse of the opening of Genesis. ‘And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’ Two uses of ‘face’ in one verse, and a third implied face, surely: God’s ...”

“... him through France, en route to yellow jersey and victor’s laurels: the vehicle carrying young James Murdoch, his Team Sky paymaster. The other stroke of luck with the gold medal was that David Cameron, with his reverse Midas touch, chose not to make the time-trial finish at Hampton Court one of his photo opportunities. While Cameron, with his obedient ...”

“... books in his excellent library and met at his table such great men as Browning, Tennyson and Henry James. Gregory was regarded as a fair landlord, and it has been conjectured that this regrettably unusual reputation was later responsible for Coole getting off so lightly in the desperate days of the Civil War. He believed in Catholic emancipation, thinking it ...”

“... In 1940, after she’d gained the admiration of Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, and had had nearly thirty of her poems published in literary journals or book collections, Elizabeth Bishop, then 28, admitted in a letter to Moore: ‘I scarcely know why I persist at all ...”

“... Each and every​ place in the life of Kenneth Clark has been investigated by James Stourton, from the country house in Suffolk where, as a boy, Clark judged the dresses of female dinner guests, to the château in Normandy belonging to his second wife, Nolwen, where, in his later years, he tried to find ways to communicate with the lovers who had once hoped he would marry them ...”

“... Hemingway, Hammett and Nabokov, and employed Thornton Wilder, Steinbeck, Chandler, Brian Moore and Anthony Shaffer). Spoto has found many ready to testify to Hitchcock’s inadequacy without them (like Brian Moore of Torn Curtain: ‘I found that he had absolutely no concept of character’); and to his inadequacy ...”

“... who had likewise profited and who had then become – as Eliot would – an Englishman: Henry James. ‘The fact of being everywhere a foreigner was probably an assistance to his native wit.’ And Donald Davie, who everywhere has his native wits about him, has he profited much from living abroad? In half-praise of George Steiner, Davie floats ‘a ...”

“... an undergraduate, he became an Idealist is a notable example. Having been persuaded by his tutor James Ward that the metaphysics of Idealism turned on the validity of the ontological argument, he was, so the story goes, in the middle of writing a paper for Ward criticising Descartes’s version of the ontological argument when he interrupted his work to buy ...”

“... she describes is familiar, and memorable, and can be recognised more generally. The pages of Henry James, for example, are full of a sexual desire he has ‘forgotten’ in this sense, that is, neither shouted out nor encrypted nor entirely repressed, just allowed to slip beyond the reach of his conscious word-choices. In her very sharp introduction to Women ...”

“... Earlier generations – that of Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain and, before them, of George Moore and James Joyce – had established it as the quintessential genre for a society still in the process of inventing itself. If the novel dealt with established societies such as England or France, the theory went, then the ...”

“... In 1956,​ James Sutherland, a professor of 18th-century literature, delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge on the subject of ‘English satire’. ‘In recent years,’ he announced, ‘there have been signs of an increased interest in satirical writing,’ but even he couldn’t have seen what was about to start unfolding in a year or two, on his very doorstep ...”

“... as David Foster Wallace uses X and Y in ‘Octet #6’, for example, or as Lorrie Moore uses Mother and Baby in ‘People like That Are the Only People Here’. Jonathan Lethem has said that ‘strange character names are an easy way to make sure the reader feels, at the deepest level, they’re entering a propositional space where they have ...”

“... when a master gave him tea and cake. Byron entertained ‘high notions of his rank’, Thomas Moore said, and he wasn’t alone in thinking that ennoblement did nothing to help Byron’s character; but he could hardly have been Byron without it. Scott astutely thought him ‘a patrician on principle’: the business of being important was crucially ...”

“... some real, some fictional, some generic, a pagan pantheon apart from God – the queen, Churchill, James Bond, Bobby Moore, Sid Vicious, Margaret Thatcher; the miner, the Spitfire pilot, the NHS nurse – and sacred spaces, some famous, such as Wembley or Waterloo or Dunkirk, some idealised: the factory, the village, the ...”

“... from one another – a passage from Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’, Larkin’s ‘Dockery and Son’ – to see whether or not there is anything specific in them which they can be said to have in common with short stories. What this element is shown to be in both poems and stories, in so far as he is able to ...”