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“... on the back wards, who had to be managed as best they could.‘Any fool can turn the blind eye,’ Samuel Beckett says in Murphy (1938), a novel set in part in the Bethlem Royal Hospital near Croydon. The hospital had recently transferred to an airy new site in Beckenham when Beckett’s friend Geoffrey Thompson got a ...”

“... even in the official wisdom which Blake’s proverbs – or Oscar Wilde’s, or Shaw’s, or Samuel Butler’s – so explicitly revise. This is wise, but can itself do with some revisionary denial. For, in resisting the idea that these contraries show ‘the moral emptiness of proverbial formulation’, Hollander does make it sound as if the reason why ...”

“... and makes it impossible for us really to feel our way into it.’ Sedlmayr could not have known Samuel Beckett’s verdict on the artist (it crops up in letters from 1934), but one suspects he would not have been surprised by its reversal of right-wing sympathies: Cézanne had the sense of his own incommensurability not only with life of such a ...”

“... out of which the tramp was born was ‘as mute as the rags he wore’.Not any more it isn’t. Samuel Beckett’s tramps are highly conversable persons, whose mode of speech, moreover, does not give the impression that their creator is bending over backwards to find and to give them an authentic voice. Chaplin’s typically rather show-off utterances ...”

“... Bennett Cerf set about issuing a new edition. But the text he gave his printers was a copy of Samuel Roth’s facsimile pirated edition, printed in New York: its errors remained to corrupt Cerf’s Random House edition of January 1934. I needn’t recite the history of the publication of Ulysses in England. The gist of the whole matter is that the ...”

“... an honours system where a limited number of members would be elected a Saoi, or ‘wise person’. Samuel Beckett was one, so is Seamus Heaney. Since Francis Stuart was one of the original members of Aosdána, he was entitled to be nominated, and this was where the trouble began. When it was proposed that Stuart be made a Saoi, there was some informal ...”

“... literature has been at pains to escape from, avoid, deflect. To what extent are, say, Swift and Beckett Irish writers? Nothing could be more obtuse than this question: but the conditions of Irish life make nothing more inevitable. A criticism founded on such necessities cannot flourish. A literature, forced by the same pressures to be endlessly alert to ...”

“... the theme of what nearly everybody feels about this play, but, surprisingly, she fails to consider Samuel Johnson’s moment of revulsion as a valid response. He obviously saw the play, or at any rate its treatment of Cordelia, as cruel, immoral and ‘contrary to the idea of natural justice’, and he might have added that the play is cruel even to its ...”

“... Blake and Wordsworth, and moving into our own century, where the light falls on Freud, Kafka and Beckett. What holds these diverse writers together is their ‘strength’, which refers less frequently now to their revisionary powers than it does to their ability to create characters of such singular force that they define the bounds of human ...”

“... with such footling restrictions, left-of-centre figures such as Cook, John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and Chris Smith have been allowed to surround themselves with like-minded ministers. The man who has replaced the Blairite factotum Stephen Byers, for example, in charge of minimum wage and trade-union rights, is Ian McCartney – a Prescott protégé who ...”

“... Bacall. And while much of the centenary publishing has just been recladding (both Methuen and Samuel French have produced handsome new editions), there has also been a collected lyrics, a book of quotations and three extra volumes of stage work from Methuen, including several plays and many short pieces long out of print or never published before. Only ...”

“... it. Inclusion, however, isn’t a good in itself, any more than diversity is. One thinks fondly of Samuel Goldwyn’s cry: ‘Include me out!’ All of this is sometimes known as cultural politics, and has given rise in our time to the so-called culture wars. For Schiller and Arnold, the phrase ‘culture wars’ would have been an oxymoron ...”

“... Wyndham Lewis saw his mission through, including a caricature of Arnold Bennett under the name of Samuel Shodbutt, here in discussion with his wife: ‘I never read more than the last page. Balzac said he knew what a book was like without even opening it. I can’t say that – that’s more than I can claim – I take off my hat to Balzac! He was a ...”

“... academic and national, to preserve his independence; he was sometimes in the wrong (he baulked at Beckett) but never stiff in opinions. He was certainly worth his salt. The literary world in which Garnett played so central a part is the subject of John Batchelor’s book. Ours was born of it, but there is no very strong family resemblance. A few writers still ...”

“... could give the Novel its generic power was psychological exactitude, especially in the hands of Samuel Richardson. Before Pamela and Clarissa, the term roman referred, he wrote, to ‘a tissue of fantastic and frivolous events which presented a threat to the taste and morals of its readers. I should like another name to be found for the works of ...”