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“... Sir Keith Joseph has chosen a good moment to kill off the Schools Council. It seems that it is a good moment to kill off all sorts of things. While thousands of young men are exposed unnecessarily to violence, and to its infliction – supposedly on our behalf, more probably to satisfy the vanity of a few unjust men and women, who want to go on running this country for a bit – a whole generation of young people faces a future of unemployment ...”

“... It’s​ april, and beyond our back wall a line of ambulances is queuing up to deliver sick passengers to the hospital. We are self-isolated, safe in our fortress, as we wait on our order from the local bakery. This will be delivered too. An innocent contrast perhaps, though hardly benign. We are a month into coronavirus time. I began it by rereading Camus and then The Betrothed by Manzoni, which I had never read ...”

“... I’ve​ had several official letters recently (including two in one week) telling me to look out because I’m a ‘clinically extremely vulnerable person’. They’re signed by ‘Matt’, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. Another government minister, Robert Jenrick, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, signs them too, but he keeps his distance (and both his names ...”

“... When I was​ 78, I wrote a book about being old. I don’t think I’d ever felt the need to swim more than twenty lengths at that time, let alone record my paltry daily achievements. Now I put letters and numbers in my diary (a sort of code) to remind me that I’ve walked at least five thousand Fitbit steps and swum a kilometre, which is forty lengths of the pool ...”

“... The landscape of Ellen Douglas’s Mississippi is designed to keep us out, to resist recognition; and the lines of its knobs and bluffs and ridges may be deciphered only by those who have been born and bred amongst them. For the rest of us they are edged but also obscured by lovingly named plants, by smilax, trillium, scuppernog vines and plum thickets ...”

“... what could be described as my first appearance in print. The actual copy I have belonged to Betty Miller, and it is in her article, which is called ‘Amazons and Afterwards’, that I appear, anonymously and representatively, as Afterwards. The journal’s editorial includes me too, as one of the pony-tailed generation of young women, clones of Francoise ...”

“... Late in July, well into the schools’ summer holidays, two copies of a consultation document entitled ‘The National Curriculum 5-16’ were delivered at the offices of the education department in a London borough large enough to sport three MPs. Slack and irresponsible as ever, the borough’s three thousand or so teachers were, in some cases, actually away ...”

“... On the first day of the school holidays – and the hottest day for 13 years – 650 London teachers of English from secondary and primary schools met to discuss the implications of the second volume of the Cox Report.* The volume elaborates a set of proposals for the teaching of language and literature to all children between five and 16 who attend state schools and who will be embarking on the first stages of the new National Curriculum from this September ...”

“... Oh, come on now! It won’t be such a tragedy if you’re a little late! They’ll manage very nicely without you, you know.’ Moving closer to her he’d started to nibble her ear and then, with mounting passion, to kiss her neck. But she hadn’t responded. His words had stung her and she thought of all the other occasions when he’d referred so disparagingly to her work for the Party – their Party; she wondered if he’d ever understand that it was only out of a sense of total commitment to her political work that she derived the strength to endure their separation for good ...”

“... Eleanor, in Christina Stead’s most recent novel, is a writer and a rewriter, whose somewhat parasitical achievement it is to have turned a story written by her father into a modest best-seller; a wry sort of apology, perhaps, for the wonderful novels, which have not been best-sellers. Christina Stead herself has written about oppressively exuberant fathers, but a judgment as well on those who live within borrowed scenarios ...”

“... Toni Morrison’s novels have been constructed, and are magically unsettled, by the unique character of historical memory for black Americans. That is to say, she has wanted to account for black experience that has been ignored or quite inadequately narrated by white historians and novelists, and even more significantly, in order to do that she has needed to confront precisely those aspects of the experience which have blocked memory, made remembering intolerable and memories inexpressible, literally unspeakable ...”

“... Within the first half-page of Toni Morrison’s novel, an 18-year-old girl has been shot dead by her middle-aged lover, and his wife has been manhandled from the funeral after attempting to cut the dead girl’s face with a knife. Both events are witnessed and kept secret by a community which has reason to distrust the police and to look kindly upon a hitherto gentle, childless couple, whose sudden, violent sorrows they recognise and are able to forgive ...”

“... Working-class children do less well at school than middle-class children, and exceptions must not be allowed to interfere with that truth. Notions of linguistic or cultural ‘deprivation’ imply lacks or absences in relation to other people and to what schools are and offer, and, by squeamishly skirting the connections between social class and children’s experiences, chances and expectations, schools have turned to forms of ‘topping-up’ and remediation, which derive from rudimentary and distorting views of the realities of culture and language in people’s lives ...”

“... Dorothy Richardson can seem to have conspired with those critics of her vast novel, over 2,000 pages long, who have complained that it is boringly avant-garde, inchoate, and vitiated by what Virginia Woolf called ‘the damned egotistical self’. It was not just perversity which provoked her to court such charges. She set out to write a novel about ‘the startling things that are not important’, and to do so through the experiences of a woman who is evasive, assertive and contrary ...”

“... My great-aunt Clara and George Gissing were friends during the last ten years of his life. He wrote to her about once a week, always as Miss Collet, and quite often bared his soul to her. She was an expert on women’s work and a civil servant. During his lifetime she gave him money to educate his sons, and after he died she not only arranged with Downing Street for a Civil List pension for them ...”