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“... importance to him. Some, such as his Highgate schoolmaster T.S. Eliot and his Oxford nemesis C.S. Lewis, had been in post since his youth, but new figures continually joined them. One was Nikolaus Pevsner, who by some quirk of mandarin humour was knighted the same year as Betjeman. Hillier struggles, unconvincingly, to find the roots of Betjeman’s ...”

“... when he wrote in Italian. Throughout his career he worked as a translator, notably of Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Dos Passos, Melville and Dickens, and published essays on them and other English and American writers. In the 1930s, this was a conscious contribution to the Anti-Fascist intellectual culture which endured in Turin: as ...”

“... and put on his tall hat.’ In his book Joyce’s Voices (1978), Kenner describes how Wyndham Lewis criticised Joyce’s use of ‘repaired’ because, Lewis claimed, ‘people repair to places in works of fiction of the humblest order.’ But as Kenner points out, Joyce’s use of ‘repaired’ is in fact suitable ...”

“... of good material to exploit, as has been only too well recognised by those who, from Barrie to Lewis Grassic Gibbon, have been – to great and lingering effect – essentially exploitative. And not only in literary terms, since it’s the working-class they’ve always used to demonstrate what it means to be Scottish. One looks for a fresh account, that ...”

“... on a courtesy visit to the USSR, as it then was, in 1988, a party which included Craig Raine, Paul Bailey and Timothy Mo. I don’t remember laughing more on any trip before or since; we were a very silly group, so much so that we often mystified our hosts and sometimes behaved disgracefully. Sue – and I even noticed this in the photo the Guardian used ...”

“... Artaud, you become dependent on the past if only because you need to have it around to reject. As Paul de Man observed in his subtle essay ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’, ‘the more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past.’* What blurs these continuities is the fact that in the natural ...”

“... 80 per cent. But a shift was already underway. In a memo to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971, Lewis Powell (whom Nixon would soon appoint to the Supreme Court) urged the defenders of capitalism to retake the field from their critics by establishing think tanks, media outlets and university professorships – all of which could help move ‘responsible ...”

“... standards), it does fascinatingly combine aspects of all the others – like Salinger, Paul Gascoigne refuses to meet Hamilton; it’s a book about difficulty of access, about a public figure withholding himself, about compromise (the white of Tottenham for the ‘peculiar blue vest’ of Lazio). Hamilton is even able to reveal that ‘Gazza is a ...”

“... activities: I have heard him praise Jean-Marie Benoist, although he had become a Giscardien, and Paul Victor, although ‘he was helping Sartre to write bad books’). But he remained apart. He rarely spoke about himself, and few people knew anything about him. Some said that he was Belgian by origin. In fact, he was born in Algeria and educated at the ...”

“... Lewis Carroll seems an obvious precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word (‘You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’), an inspired parodist of what Saussure later called the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (that is, its being grounded in nothing but convention) and extremely proud of his ability to ‘explain all the poems that ever were invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet ...”

“... Britain and France as gangsters. What I remember were the things that made us laugh: the column by Paul Jennings that had a tongue-twister about ‘tuskless rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays that we had next to no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate ...”

“... appetites – for tales, news, gossip or truth. Among the essays is one on Books of Hours by Paul Saenger, who discusses the effect of the ancient discovery of silent reading and the later development of the portable, personal book. He looks at the history of oral versus silent prayer and the consequences of the privacy the silently-read page offers ...”

“... start. No Biblical author is more obviously in control of the conventions he uses than St Paul, and the single essay on the Pauline Epistles, by Michael Goulder, does full justice to the Apostle’s originality, and his ability to outsmart his opponents by mobilising the rhetorical devices of his day. With the Gospels, the interplay of individual ...”

“... prejudice apparent as late as Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, but Oxfordians like C.S. Lewis assailed modernism from a conservative standpoint and Carey does it from a populist one. Modernism was by far the most significant movement of the period with which the book deals: it changed the face of literary culture and shook art to its ...”

“... and enters a purgatory reminiscent of the no-man’s-land inhabited by deserter-troglodytes in Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. Audrey succumbs to encephalitis lethargica, the ‘sleepy sickness’ that swept Europe after the First World War. Constantin Von Economo, who first described the condition, called its most extreme sufferers ...”