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“... We know what we are in for, just as surely as we do when we open an Agatha Christie or an Elmore Leonard. The formula is simple, repeated with variations in most of M.R. James’s 33 ghost stories, and still guaranteed to give pleasure today just as it did to those fuddled dons and sleepy schoolboys who first heard James ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... and Thoreau, or it may have something to do with everyone needing health insurance. People who read novels in Britain and Ireland generally do so on holiday from work, or on the way to work, or in bed at night, exhausted after work, or at the weekend, dreading the return to work on Monday morning; but if you were to take the protagonists of most novels ...”

“... better than Dylan.’ Crosby briefly became Mitchell’s inamorato and produced her first album. Leonard Cohen, another influential early lover, helped too. ‘There was a certain ferocity associated with her gift. She was like a storm,’ Cohen said. ‘She was fully formed: uneducated, uninformed, uninstructed, unneeding of any kind of influences.’ Cohen ...”

“... helped him get another job.Reacting against the fundamentalist Protestantism of his childhood, he read voraciously, turning to socialism and the philosophy of Nietzsche. He began to publish articles and aphorisms in A.R. Orage’s periodical, the New Age, and to meet Scottish intellectuals including the composer Francis George Scott (to whom Hugh MacDiarmid ...”

“... die can tie his sin tap and’), is a translation of a concrete poem by Ernst Jandl. But if you read Bernstein’s libretto you will find a text more transparent, and much sadder, than the one Perloff describes. With Benjamin stuck at the Spanish border, near death, a chorus of angels sings a quasi-blues: ‘Knew a man once/Had no tongue/Walked in fog/Till ...”

“... Self-respecting guys don’t read Westerns. In fact, unless you look carefully, no one seems to read them. The cowboy novel rates lower even than pornography in the scale of cultural visibility. W.H. Smith (true to their origins: they won a monopoly at railway stations in 1848 in return for an undertaking to purify the nation’s reading matter) recently banished their modest selection of top-shelf skin magazines ...”

“... of the literary culture: they pronounced on the subject endlessly, and their works can often be read as lamentations over the sorry condition of a world that has no place, no privileged or central place, for works like theirs. When Victorian literary men mused on the forthcoming challenge of Democracy, they tended to assume that, however rough things ...”

“... in his desk drawer, had at last been shown to friends in London. Rosamond Lehmann had praised it; Leonard Woolf wanted to publish it. The story was Olivia; the author, anonymous on publication in 1949, was Dorothy Strachey Bussy, Lytton Strachey’s sister. Olivia is a piece of spirited homage, by a woman both spirited and prone to homage. Dorothy Strachey ...”

“... Wyatt Earp.’ And it’s as good as Lord Byron. Take the life of Disraeli, for ‘novelist’ read ‘poet’, and you’ve got an epic about what happened to Byron after he’d recovered from that deadly fever at Missolonghi. Having fought for Greek independence, he falls out of love with the country and returns home to make a career in British ...”

“... of narrative in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry being so widely and respectfully read, and well-directed too, since it clarifies what’s confused in the Penguin introduction by the editors’ simultaneous recommendation of Post-Modernist ‘secrecy’ and the Keatsian ‘long poem’. The kind of story which flows from A to Z is clearly not ...”

“... as his own … Since he was a boy he had been in business of some kind but had never learned to read or write. He had to rely on pure instinct to know the people he could trust.’ Just as the word ‘gugering’ belonged to a world that was disappearing, the Shah is someone whose manners and habits are part of a time that has almost passed.The figure at ...”

“... To read the letters of Dorothy Richardson is to become exhausted, vicariously, by the ‘non-stop housewifery’ which consumed her days. From 1918 until 1939, Richardson and her husband moved three times a year. Every autumn, they settled in a primitive rented cottage in Cornwall, where Richardson was responsible for shopping, cooking and cleaning, as well as for her own and her husband’s sizeable correspondence ...”

“... he wrote in 1965 for the New Yorker, ostensibly a review of autobiographies by Evelyn Waugh and Leonard Woolf. On the pretext that ‘no one can read an autobiography which describes a time, a country, a class familiar to him without starting to compose his own,’ Auden turned this into an 11,000-word comparison of his ...”

“... the first, tone-setting story in his collection of short stories, Cross Channel (1996), is called Leonard Verity. In Barnes’s latest confection, set in the not-too-distant-future, the wealthy and unscrupulous entrepreneur Sir Jack Pitman imports and rebuilds all the major English tourist attractions on the Isle of Wight and opens up the island as a ...”