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“... poetry and belief, at the time of Empson’s return from China; this fashion, led by such as C.S. Lewis and practised by such as Fr Martin Jarrett-Kerr, seemed interesting to others, who may thus have seemed, willy-nilly, to be crypto-Christians. One point of importance in this, as usual good, but as usual digressive, essay ...”

“... The small rain down can rain? Christ that my love were in my arms And I in my bed again. C.S. Lewis used to say that it was his wife he was thinking of, not his mistress or girlfriend, otherwise he would most likely have written ‘in her bed again’. However that may be, the point is that de la Mare and Stevie Smith and Anon are all appealing to us over ...”

“... profit from the pain of those seeking answers about what happened to their loved ones,’ Brandon Lewis, then Northern Ireland secretary, wrote as he shepherded the bill through Parliament. ‘This feeds a pernicious and distorted view of the past, promoted and peddled by those with a vested interest in presenting the British state as the aggressor … We ...”

“... indescribably evil left-wing journalist and intellectual, based, it is said, on Harold Laski and Lewis Mumford. Another antagonist is Dominique Francon, the beautiful, rich, super-intelligent heiress who loves him, and thus, for reasons too baroque to go into, spends hundreds of pages marrying his enemies and doing all she can to destroy him. The tale ...”

“... indeed, his make-up) distinguished him from contemporary rockabilly dudes like Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins. He found an obvious joy in the staged act of seduction: the body does brazen, while the face remains convincingly bashful. Pamela Clarke Keogh’s Elvis: The Man. The Life. The Legend (2004) is mostly what you’d expect from ...”

“... account of muscular and gestural movement, frame by frame, as we find it in Wyndham Lewis, early Peter Weiss, the Beckett of Watt (the turn of the century Germans even had a word for it: Sekundenstil)? But it is not analytic; it does not break conventional gestures, conventional acts and names (‘I took a carton of milk’) into the ‘neural ...”

“... then, the apparent romanticism achieved, they become scientific again.’ Much later, Empson told Martin Dodsworth that the structural idea had been ‘to take a story and interpose a scene of apparently total irrelevance in the middle’: we can now confirm the accuracy of that recollection as well as offering belated congratulations to the Granta ...”

“... the public career, in Notes for a New Culture, Blake was alluded to only as a source for Wyndham Lewis. Vorticist prose, Ackroyd claims, ‘closely resembles that of William Blake; there is even a prose poem in Blast, entitled Hamp, which draws heavily upon Blake’s prophetic books.’ Blake (and Bunyan) ‘were both convinced that their work derived from a ...”

“... Portrait of Innocent X. The reviews managed to express both revulsion and excitement, and Wyndham Lewis made serious claims:Of the younger painters, none actually paints so beautifully as Francis Bacon … I must not attempt to describe these amazing pictures – the shouting creatures in glass cases, these dissolving ganglia the size of a small fist in which ...”

“... 953168 5Food Policy: Integrating Health, Environment and Society by Tim Lang, David Barling and Martin Caraher.Oxford, 320 pp., £32.95, March 2009, 978 0 19 856788 2The Memoirs of the Rt Hon the Earl of Woolton.Cassell, 452 pp., 1959Eating: What We Eat and Why It Matters by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.Arrow, 400 pp., £7.99, September 2006, 978 0 09 ...”

“... which could be nice; Margaret Drabble’s faced the street, but with curtains so long and John Lewis-like I’d be frightened they’d get into the prose; Edna O’Brien’s had some relics of Samuel Beckett, hardly likely to unchain the imagination or get the words flowing. All have had awful fireplaces. Can we see where you work? No fear. 11 ...”

“... to his body as a walking lab, pills slushing against potions in his insides. Ten years earlier, Martin Amis had reviewed one of the first British documentaries about Aids for the Observer. Aids, he wrote, ‘is a visitation that makes you believe in the Devil’: With Aids … it seems to be promiscuity itself that is the cause. After a few hundred ...”

“... to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a quarter of a century, received two thousand from Norman Sherry. These are huge tomes. Even such a minuscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been ...”