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“... legend: his having been sent out as a child to work in a factory. Gottlieb gives the story on page one: Charles had endured a difficult childhood: when he was 11, his father, a well-meaning but improvident clerk in the navy pay office, was sent to debtors’ prison, with young Charles put to menial work in a blacking factory – a social disgrace that ...”

“... attending a college inquest on Balliol’s performance in last year’s Norrington Table, I read Tim Heald’s introduction to this book, in which he recalls Cobb explaining to his students that they could study modern European history through its canonical topics or, less safely, through a miscellany of marginal episodes about which Cobb himself knew little ...”

“... phenomena unthinkable in more prosperous times: for example, Thomas Piketty’s seven hundred-page volume of economic theory, Capital in the 21st Century, joining the bestseller lists. During crises of capitalism in the 20th century, the equivalent bestsellers were narratives of social history. R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of ...”

“... you could say so.’He pats my arm consolingly.‘Be happy with that.’24 May. Tim Lott collects me at 6.30 and we drive over to Kensal Rise where I am to do an evening to raise funds to help pay for a legal challenge to Brent Council’s plans to close Kensal Rise Library (and five others). Tim is ...”

“... to the afternoon. ‘Dacre would call us a “load of cunts”,’ the former Mail crime reporter Tim Miles told Adrian Addison, ‘or a “shower of cunts”. It was always “cunt this” and “cunt that”. He did like the word cunt.’ And yet, in the natural way of things, over time the editor was to grope for other words. According to one source, ‘he ...”

“... each of his two novels (A Timeless Passion and Tara and Claire) carries before the dedication page a tribute to his editor, Jennie Bradshaw/Erdal, ‘who has worked closely with me for many years and whose contribution has been invaluable’ in the case of the first novel, ‘immense’ in the case of the second. Such an odd sort of acknowledgment to find ...”

“... Brian Aldiss gives his definition of Science Fiction on page one of Chapter One of a five-hundred-page volume. This is admirably bold of him – more timorous scholars tuck their definitions away inconspicuously, or else develop complex excuses for not giving any – as well as being admirably genial ...”

“... They’re not cool enough, or edgy enough, their delight in the ridiculous is too obvious. When Tim Roth, as the cop in Reservoir Dogs, explains to his mentor that the diamond-heist gang have code-names based on colours, and he is Mr Orange, his mentor repeats the name before his next speech – this is not in the screenplay – and can’t help ...”

“... The obvious question is: what made him keep it? To tell us about his times, or to tell his page about himself? These are the reasons why most men keep diaries, but neither was the compulsion behind this one. This is perhaps why, with this latest edition of Parson Woodforde, we push along beside a writer who, one imagines, would not have cared to be ...”

“... Literacy. Yeats’s carelessness is compulsive and attractive: he apologises for not rewriting a page which he’s just let ‘get into some salid oil’, he is busy reading a poem ‘in long unrhyming lines – alexindrines I think you call them’. These are snatches of unself-conscious talk and they have all the warm intense presence of urgent speech. It ...”

“... Amis was Larkin’s close friend, and Larkin a great letter-writer, and since the words on the page served suddenly to bring back a long-past occasion, it seems possible that a series of sentences has survived. What interested me was the degree to which the piece of recall failed to affect the novel in any way. Amis is mentioned in Hugh Kenner’s A ...”

“... and Sue Tinson was once a candidate for the job of Head of Information at Tory Central Office. On page 366, Sir Bernard declares his hatred for ‘the lowest form of newspaper life – the investigative journalist’. Just as Sir James Goldsmith – that great enemy of the ‘see-through’ society – started a news magazine which was reluctant to publish ...”

“... Marine’ because you’d fallen for this young priest he was a loiner Tim Ryan that’s a lie and driven with him July a heatwave all through the West the East Riding some harbour Hornsea Spurn Head it’s pathetic you were in cheesecloth he’d green shades I could scream still the Society of Jesus White Fathers it’s invisible ...”

“... Reviewers are always sternly instructed to check page proofs against finished copies of books, and I do, I will. But the proofs of Anthony Powell’s A Writer’s Notebook provide, along with numerous unimportant oddities of phrase and spelling which seem to be errors of transcription from script to voice to type to print (‘I would like to thank my wife, who read the manuscript book onto tape, and also Helen Gould, who typed it’), one lovely new alignment which ought not to be allowed simply to vanish into its own correction ...”

“... there’s a lot to be said for more nuanced and traditional ways of conveying ambivalence on the page. Transgression works to clear a space, as for instance Philip Roth’s gleeful repudiation of sexual respectability in and after Portnoy’s Complaint freed him to sift through his inheritance, literary and cultural, and to keep only what he wanted. Misogyny ...”