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“... man without religion, and one who was ‘not a Muslim’. Then last December he published a three-page declaration: ‘Why I have embraced Islam’. Rushdie’s religious change of heart is, of course, a matter for his own conscience. As a public act, however, it is clearly meant to invite a response. Together with his decision not to permit further ...”

“... It is a very true remark and pinpoints the prevailing weakness in his autobiographical writings. Page after page, with fatal and increasing fluency as Experiment proceeds, he explains – only to have to admit that, in fact, nothing has been explained. He is not, as an autobiographer, able to make something creative out of ...”

“... Literacy. Yeats’s carelessness is compulsive and attractive: he apologises for not rewriting a page which he’s just let ‘get into some salid oil’, he is busy reading a poem ‘in long unrhyming lines – alexindrines I think you call them’. These are snatches of unself-conscious talk and they have all the warm intense presence of urgent speech. It ...”

“... a poem by Sir Walter Raleigh). One is a piece of vivid journalism recognisably in the tradition of Norman Mailer and other modern American writers. All these books are from literary stables. Michael Arlen’s first appeared in the New Yorker, and comes to the British reader via two very respected publishing houses (Fabers, incidentally, are apparently issuing ...”

“... unintentionally hilarious pages. Throughout, he refers to himself in the third person, rather as Norman Mailer and my small children do; though my kids, of course, do it only when they know they’ve been naughty and wish to neutralise rage with bogus charm. Gay Talese did all this dreary work – nearly a decade of listening to socially disorganised wankers ...”

“... is his sophisticated historical analysis of the law and legal change, going far beyond the Norman Yoke theories of Levellers and Winstanley invoked in the introduction. Warr indeed derides English law as the malleable tool of successive conquerors; yet he also draws on the most advanced scholarship to comment on the similarity of Anglo-Saxon and ...”

“... on the eve of the Battle of Flodden in 1513. That is followed immediately by a nearly twenty-page selection from Gavin Douglas’s great translation of the Aeneid ‘written in the language of Scottis natioun’, completed in that same year. This juxtaposition of Latin, Gaelic and Scots may point to different Scotlands; yet there are shared features. The ...”

“... which themselves rest on an old and interesting – if very shaky – mythology. In spite of the Norman Conquest, and the proliferation of Latinate words in English, we’ve somehow remained Nordic in our linguistic hearts, and if Spree is also the name of a German river, so much the better. French is fancy and fashionable, but we aren’t going to fall for ...”

“... up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to his point, since what he really means is ‘the major contemporary ...”

“... Moynihan announced in the New York Times, ‘Jewish writers – Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, inter alia – have emerged as a dominant movement in our literature. Herzog, in several senses, is the great pay-off book of that movement. It is a masterpiece, the first the movement has produced.’ Herzog not only had critics ...”

“... about his strong claim to be the discoverer of non-Euclidean geometry, which is ably defended by Norman Daniels in his book Thomas Reid’s ‘Inquiry’ (now reissued with a useful new Afterword); nor about many of the finer details of his epistemology and metaphysics, such as his most excellent defence of the primary/secondary quality distinction, or his ...”

“... to tackle the thousand pages of Karl’s Joseph Conrad, or the shelf of books – Jocelyn Baines, Norman Sherry, Zdzislaw Najder, Eloise Knapp Hay – that would provide a richer and more chaotic account of this mostly painful career; and not everybody will be put off by Mr Tennant’s not saying anything very interesting about the fictions, of which he ...”

“... the free-market excesses that were to follow. Punk auditioned the dark night of Keith Joseph and Norman Tebbit. It turns out that none of the punk parasites much liked the sounds or the bands who produced them. They were career anarchists, varnishing their leather armour while they waited for an offer from the Daily Mail. Essentially, NME ‘new ...”

“... face of it, this film is about a revolt against the restrictions of postwar Britain. But to read Norman Davies’s new book is to see many other ideas, some conscious and others perhaps unrecognised by the scriptwriters, stamped on the pages of Passport to Pimlico. Burgundy, as it happens, is one of the vanished kingdoms he visits. England is not, and yet ...”

“... and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now ... I don’t know which of us is writing this page. He doesn’t know as he is writing, perhaps, but we do; and he knows as soon as he has written the page. It’s the other one, Borges. It’s tempting to think that fame, or finding his voice as the inventor of his own ...”