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“... These five books continue in then very different ways the intense debate about the purpose of literary criticism and its relation to ‘theory’. Addressing Frank Kermode has its origin in a conference devoted to Kermode’s work. Five papers selected from those delivered at the conference are followed by a reply from Kermode himself; five more follow which ‘acknowledge, more or less directly’, his ‘influence ...”

“... that he has decided to live for the sake of those whose warm feelings he had misunderstood.’ In Martin Seymour-Smith’s Robert Graves: His Life and Works Dunn is described as the man who saved Graves’s life, though Dunn does not mention so routine a matter. The most interesting reference to Sassoon in Dunn’s text arises from his ‘quixotic ...”

“... may sometimes be unavoidable. This is my sentiment as I contemplate the four novels of Alan Warner. He has been highly praised (‘dazzling’, ‘classic’, ‘significant’, ‘vastly gifted’, ‘a genius’, ‘one of the most influential literary mould-breakers ever’), and I’m sure none of these eulogies, understandably preserved on the ...”

“... Morvern Callar, the narrator of Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995) and These Demented Lands (1997), reacts to the suicide of her boyfriend by lighting a Silk Cut, opening her Christmas presents and shaving her legs in a hot bath. The boyfriend is lying in a pool of blood but Morvern remains emotionally numb: ‘Trying to get in the oven to heat up the pizza ...”

“... instrument, the photograph, have proved crucial in the history of supernatural phenomena. The Martin sisters had a plate camera in the convent and passed happy hours of their sequestered lives making images of Thérèse, their youngest and most dear, sometimes in costume as Joan of Arc at the stake, but most of the time as the icon of the Little Flower ...”

“... rise of the writer as cynosure; with fame comes responsibility, it seems, for even bad boys like Martin Amis speak of their world sorrow, while, elsewhere, playwrights and poets take power. Long gone the days of anti-social surrealist anarchy among writers, when Breton and his kind acclaimed psychotics as heroes and spat on morality, private and ...”

“... was regretting that Madonna and not the Virgin Mary was a role model for the young, and Marina Warner saying that ‘the reality her myth describes is over.’ That, surely, is the basic reason why Stanley Spencer’s religious paintings are mostly ridiculous rather than moving. ‘What ho, Giotto!’ he cried when he had the commission to decorate ...”

“... Hockney came across must be John Mavrogordato’s, published by the Hogarth Press in 1951 (Rex Warner wrote the introduction). When Hockney’s prints were published a few years later, in 1967, Stephen Spender, a friend and early advocate, collaborated on a new translation with the publisher Nikos Stangos, himself Greek and a poet, of 14 of the Cavafy ...”

“... tried to chat with the exhausted Carter, regaling him with tales of his Hollywood days long ago at Warner Bros. ‘He kept talking about Jack Warner,’ Carter later complained. ‘Who’s Jack Warner?’ But once on the podium, Reagan was a master. He stood facing Arlington, reading his ...”

“... a place for his work at the centre of her collection. In 1938, Carrington and Ernst moved to Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, a small village near the Rhône Valley. Moorhead describes their time there as an idyll cut short by the outbreak of war. Ernst was rounded up as a German national and thrown into prison. Catherine Yarrow, another British painter who’d ...”

“... him big bucks and a big assignment: Rebel without a Cause. Afterwards, according to Clancy, Jack Warner pushed him against the wall – ‘He positively fire breathes Brut aftershave’ – and tore him off a strip. ‘Next time you rob me put a mask on your fucking face and do it with a gun!’ Warner growls. It’s a ...”

“... Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, and continued with Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre. Maria Janis, like these protagonists, makes herself heard from the pages of a trial, with a peculiar, powerful and, in her case, poignant story to tell: these are the particular lives which might topple the great monolith of misogynist ...”

“... categories a bit by saying: ‘To coin a phrase, we rob the poor to feed the rich.’ But in the Warner Brothers’ cartoon Robin Hood Daffy (1958), when Robin Hood (Daffy Duck) tries to persuade Friar Tuck (Porky Pig) that he is Robin Hood by robbing a rich guy and giving the money to another, presumably poor, guy, Porky is still not convinced. (As a song ...”

“... to work on the film, wresting it from the hands of the white director Norman Jewison, persuading Warner Brothers that it needed to be as long as it is, that the scenes of Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Egypt and Mecca had to be shot on location, all this is a version of Malcolm’s struggle on behalf of the blacks; maybe the real subject of the movie. There’s ...”

“... the vogue-word: but this seems to me a farrago of fantasy-triggers. I was astonished when Marina Warner asserted on television that the book ‘gives you an astonishing understanding of a political situation’. On the same day, Marilyn Butler was equally effusive on Radio 3 and Hermione Lee assured us in the Observer that the author has ‘impeccably heroic ...”