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“... rally. What happens between the Western reader and his book will always be intriguing. But short of some bibliometric equivalent to Masters and Johnson, it’s hard to see how the sociologist can ever penetrate the mystery. A question which recurs time and again in reading Mann is why sociology doesn’t work for literature. Take his stab at defining ...”

“... to correct misunderstandings before they become irremediable, to seize the fateful moment – in short, his failure to get the hang of life – is the failure of a certain common sort of Englishness, muted, passive, buttoned-up and sad. It is a failure articulated and mourned elsewhere in English literature – for example, in the poetry of Hardy, Stevie ...”

“... edition of that play in five years, following hard upon Harold Jenkins’s magisterial Arden and Philip Edwards’s serious Cambridge version.1 It may well be asked by non-Shakespearians and non-publishers whether all this editorial activity is needed, and by whom, and the Oxford team anticipates the question by asserting the boldness as well as the ...”

“... a telegraphese for journalism and academic use alike – to subsume the period under two poets, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Their contemporaries can then be located at intervals on the line stretching between these two not wholly imaginary points, with Robert Lowell appearing now at one end, then at the other. An ill effect of this rough-and-ready ...”

“... by the sword, taking rhetorical risks sometimes almost as fatal (in career terms at least) as Sir Philip Sidney’s neglect of his thigh-armour at Zutphen. He is particularly good on the dangers young would-be courtiers ran into in the 1590s when the dominant literary modes for pursuing advancement shifted from love poetry and pastoral to a mock-rebellion ...”

“... fictionalised: a tragicomic riff on the Calverley story. A Yorkshire Tragedy, by contrast, is short and terse. No names are used: the speech headings are just ‘Husband’, ‘Wife’, ‘Servant’ and so on. Some of its wording comes direct from the Butter pamphlet, but the story is compressed into a dark, claustrophobic parable.In these twinned plays ...”

“... mostly priests and nuns, smoke, drink and drive far more than any other population worldwide. In short, the restrictions are not respected: the shops in fact serve around 41,000 customers and the Italian state simply accepts the considerable loss in tax revenue. As the auditors commented, the income is welcome, but being responsible for unloading tax-free ...”

“... and so eager to believe that the Muse of History doesn’t have to pay any attention to it? The short answer has to do with tact and tactics. He is afraid that even true claims for art will become false when stated; their very utterance will do them in, shift them to the realm of pomp and abstraction. The longer answer is found in the thematic arc of The ...”

“... allows only subsidiary places to the strenuous translation of Psalms by Sir Thomas Wyatt or Sir Philip Sidney (the ‘Sidneian Psalms’ acclaimed by a poem of Donne) or Milton. Yet Donne himself, who worried whether poetry was equal to the expression of divine truth unless a divine spirit directed it, maintained that the ‘tropes and figures’ of the ...”

“... to make the ambiguous miracle of the father twice. It is clear that if the face behind were also short on life and lacked blood and resembled a mask, then the power of the first image would be reduced; it would seem like a failure, its inwardness merely like an absence of outwardness, a brute refusal to comfort the viewer or endear itself to us. There is a ...”

“... they’ve seen it start at zero! The corpse falls out of nowhere, you see!’ Hitchcock was just short of his 63rd birthday when Truffaut interviewed him. He had remained staggeringly inventive throughout a long, prolific and highly profitable career, and there were seven films yet to come, including The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964). Two American ...”

“... no more bars … if you don’t stop now’ – and within a year had married the sociologist Philip Rieff. Now she wrote about Nightwood instead of imitating it: her adviser, Kenneth Burke, had once lived with Barnes in Greenwich Village, and what she ended up writing – she argued that the novel made beauty out of something dissolute, where T.S. Eliot ...”

“... that, in his own small way, he would have given it a hard time. I am not sure what his reaction to Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist would have been. He would doubtless have admired the dedication of Roth’s ‘pure’ Communist, O’Day, but it is to Ira Ringold that my father would have instinctively warmed – to what Roth describes as ‘the sanity of ...”

“... the UK to piggyback on the publication of this book),* Purple America and The Ice Storm, and his short-story collections, The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven and Demonology. He also co-edited Joyful Noise, a collection of essays devoted to the New Testament. In The Black Veil Moody assumes the role of apostle. This book is a secular gospel, a modern ...”

“... never heard of. It was all terribly shocking. Thom was a great reader of novels. He disdained short fiction and didn’t read much non-fiction, unless it was Edward Gibbon or Darwin. I am nearly opposite in my tastes, but we did share our enthusiasms. Thom, for instance, thought Philip Roth was the cat’s miaow. I ...”