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“... 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 ...”

“... standard edition of his prose writings, but we now have the full run in a distinguished edition by James Woolley. It is now possible, without visiting rare book libraries, to read the essays of both men in their original context, with their relation to one another in clear view. Sheridan’s (hopelessly inferior) essays help to throw light on Swift’s ...”

“... they did not intend any nigger to hold office in the United States.’ That same year in Greene County, Alabama armed whites broke up a Republican campaign rally, killing four blacks and wounding 54 others. In 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana black Republicans and white Democrats both claimed the right to govern. When the whites prevailed in battle they ...”

“... of the Senderista cult. One might have expected Shakespeare to draw on the examples of Conrad, Greene or Paul Theroux for his fantasia on violence and evil at the headwaters of the Amazonian jungle. Instead he borrows the fluid, elliptic techniques of Latin Americans such as Fuentes, Marquez and – above all – Llosa. The Vision of Elena Silves seems in ...”

“... golden opinions by executing what must have been a very delicate commission – a cover story on James Joyce and Finnegans Wake. So by the time that Chambers fired Bellow in 1945, he was himself in the very middle of his journey. He had led a shadowy life in which he dreaded two varieties of exposure. He had been badly frightened, both physically and ...”

“... clear, too, that he learned incessantly from his fellows in the theatre such as Kyd and Lyly and Greene and Peele and Nashe, who were not incapable of objecting to his assimilative invasion. Shakespeare was, like Chaucer, a ‘great translator’, which meant he was capable of creative response, in terms of adaptation and mimicry. But he gave back ...”

“... regime largely protected from inquiring eyes by its inaccessibility and its secret police. Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul, published in 1973, was set among the exiles in Corrientes, across the Argentine frontier, but it caught very well the claustrophobic atmosphere of 20th-century Paraguay. The country’s greatest novelist, Augusto Roa Bastos, long ...”

“... One from 1965 named Prell after its central component, a very green shampoo, was well described by James Schuyler: A dozen bottles of Prell – that insidious green – terrible green roses and grapes, glass dangles like emeralds, long strings of green glass beads, a couple of strands looped up. Under glass, in the centre, a blue-green pietà, sweating an ...”

“... the case of Eliot and that of Ezra Pound with Professor Ricks, Annie Cohen-Solal and Clive James. Professor Steiner began by discomfiting Ricks: there were, he remarked humorously, two attacks in the TLS which Professor Ricks, fresh from his transatlantic flight, would not have had time to come to terms with. A wan smile from Professor Ricks. And ...”

“... Phoenix, the American base not far from the airport. The red-haired Crowley is a descendant of James Joyce with the multiple-passport-wielding aura of a Graham Greene character. He was Unicef’s man in Sudan for a long time. He feels this is a crucial moment for Afghanistan and is sure that the current situation, with ...”

“... Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry ...”

“... to Congo follows ‘in the footsteps of Mr Kurtz’. And not only Kurtz. After Conrad came Gide, Greene, Kapuściński, Mailer and Naipaul. Congo is endlessly fertile literary terrain. Seven years of war there – in a country the size of Western Europe with a population of almost seventy million – occupied fewer column inches in the Western press than ...”

“... your thought’. She is delighted to accept. This is joltingly hard to read today – even P.D. James, no slave to political correctness, calls it ‘blatant misogyny’. It goes a long way to ruining what is otherwise a prime example of golden age detective fiction. Sayers gets into similar difficulties with the character of Harriet Vane, who is unmarried ...”

“... paying back my respect to the idea of the comic now. We try our best. Wonderful quote from Henry James that I’m working on at the moment: ‘We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. The rest is the madness of art.’AS: How are you working on that quote now?TP: Mucking about with it. Making a film. Writing music. It writes ...”

“... chapter to the ways in which the plays of the period – such as the anonymous comedy George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the ...”