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“... of the Forties. I went to University College Dublin once, after he had left for his Henry James Chair at New York University, and found the college echoing with the praises of the flown savant, with his sayings and with stories of his tenure. Two sorts of ex cathedra were apparent. He had made his mark, in the way that people hope for from ...”

“... snobs and sports are by no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a ...”

“... BBC producers, all anxious about the way one used one’s voice, but I returned to print when Karl Miller took over at the Spectator, then at the New Statesman, then at the Listener, and then right here. I wrote occasionally for the Sundays and quite often for American journals, so I suppose I am or was one of the race of grubbing professors, though a very ...”

“... child was Georgiana’s (the event has echoes of the ‘warming-pan affair’ which embarrassed James II’s Queen). Having given her husband a long-wanted male heir, the Duchess naturally expected him to pay off her prodigious gambling debts. This he failed to do. Soon she became pregnant again, this time by a future prime minister, Earl Grey, who in years ...”

“... questions about the mysteries of the Devil gets such good historical answers. From Tymms (1949) to Miller (1985) to the touchingly named Herdman (is he trying to keep us safe, inside the yard?) the literary study of doubles roots itself in Christian accounts of the world, describing how, by trick, by election or by sin, characters break open, split apart, see ...”

“... the memory of one’s spouse that gives adultery its dirty kick? (In a poem called ‘Adultery’, James Dickey, who knew whereof he spoke, concluded: ‘Guilt is magical.’) Why are ‘peccadillos’ deemed part of the devil’s handiwork? (Most peccadillos are as harmless as hobbies.) Is a belt easier to swipe than, say, a pair of cashmere socks or a bottle ...”

“... used to go out on the town together, bar-hopping, up to God knows what. Behaviour of Henry Miller buddies. But, however scabrous the circumstances, Brooks never lost a thoroughly un-Millerian elegance and self-irony and when she finally took up her pen and wrote, in her sixties and seventies, she wrote, not about life in the lower depths, but about her ...”

“... After the death of Henry James’s father in 1882, his sister-in-law Catharine Walsh, better known as Aunt Kate, burned a large quantity of the family papers, including many letters between Henry James senior and his wife. Henry James himself in later life made a number of bonfires in which he destroyed a great quantity of the letters he had received ...”

“... their mark. All the more of a pity that two very distinctive women, Christian Watt and Christian Miller, are out. Perhaps the limitations on formal schooling for women were an advantage. It certainly seems that those chosen to be here did not express themselves in stiff school-taught English and standard phraseology. Such a form of expression casts a ...”

“... that ‘there is some connection between Burns’s “Vision” and the vision of Boethius.’ James Kinsley’s encyclopedic Oxford edition of the poems and songs has traced this connection, in its assessment of sources for the work. The supernatural devices of Pope’s Rape of the Lock are employed; the division of the poem into sections called Duans ...”

“... pale Hawksmoor is an inhabitant of the present day who reminds one not only of Dyer but of P.D. James’s recurrent character Inspector Dalgliesh – one of her novels, A Taste for Death, published the following year, has a church murder in London, draped in the poses of this sensitive, cultivated policeman, and it also has, like Hawksmoor, a suspected ...”

“... The ‘traditional’ English novel of good and bad manners was radicalised and updated. Karl Miller helped to institute a new criticism which seemed to owe more to a modest, clean, unadorned English than to the tenets of academe. Metaphor and pretty prose were not much favoured. In another part of the forest, some writers were questioning the plainness ...”

“... The earlier plays of David Mamet seemed to spring from a meeting between Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, as if the characters from The Caretaker or The Homecoming had caught the American anxieties of Death of a Salesman. Pinter is also never far from the later plays, and he directed Oleanna in London; but other, more oblique influences now hover in the air ...”

“... James Merrill​ has in Langdon Hammer the biographer he would have wished for: intelligent, appreciative, sympathetic, thorough, a first-rate reader of the poems, and an excellent writer to boot. Merrill would have hated to be the subject of a plodding biography. He was all about stylishness and elegance, in poetry and in life ...”

“... pulpit. It does contain subtleties, even in the brass section, but it’s seldom averse to a yell. James Hogg could sound polished when he felt like it, but he was thought noisy by the aspiring Edinburgh gentry. They were eager for lessons in belletristic politeness, and knew he could be vulgar and uncouth. He knew they knew it, too. Hogg was a ...”