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“... pigeon-holed him. ‘No man writes historical romances so well,’ said the Pall Mall Gazette. Lewis Melville described him as ‘our outstanding costume novelist’. ‘The prince of story-tellers’, said another, unnamed, reviewer. Was he? I was never greatly attracted to costume novels, even in adolescent years when I was devouring fiction, so can draw ...”

“... Now, Pay Later in nine days, so that he could offer a story of his own to the film producer Jay Lewis, who wanted him to adapt a novel by someone else. It was published almost as an afterthought, but it launched Story in the mainstream of English fiction, where he belonged – never attracting enormous sales, but building up a solid readership. Live Now was ...”

“... full-frontal psychopathology of anti-semitism. They probably accept, as true for that decade, Sir Lewis Namier’s vision of the politics of the 1760s as dominated by clique and pique rather than by constitutional principle, but would hesitate about his overarching behavioural conservatism. Call this open-mindedness, pussy-footing or Vicar of Bravery, it has ...”

“... prided himself on being the only person who could claim the friendship of those arch-enemies C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot. Lewis and Williams both aimed at the disruption of the realist novel though the use of erudite fantasy, drawing on Dante and Plato and Milton; they wanted to make contemporary England ...”

“... plots, but we learn in an epilogue that the novel is in fact the work of one of its characters, Lewis Lewison, an aspiring writer (his first poems are published in Locus Solus, ‘a little magazine whose reputation was unrivalled’), and a no-holds-barred masochist. In one episode the ill-fated Lewis arranges to have ...”

“... And yet Connolly’s reputation is probably as high as it has ever been. Nice one, to be sure. Philip Larkin once wrote that Connolly was ‘at his best when able to assimilate his subject into the scenario of his own temperament’. But for connolly such assimilation was compulsive. Almost everything he wrote was touched with woe-begone ...”

“... captivated the nation, and from it developed a wonderful gallimaufry of imaginary characters – Lewis the Goat, Mrs Bagwash, her daughter Nausea. It established the basic formula of anarchic private world, whether town hall or RAF station or run-down spa, that would yield, in turn, Itma, and Much Binding and Merry-Go-Round, and see us all through some lousy ...”

“... like that discerned by Martin Scorsese in the worn features of the aging funnyman played by Jerry Lewis in his splendid recent film King of Comedy. The stories in Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo (1963), a collection of 20 urban fables occupying a point in his work midway between the massive collection of Italian Folktales (1956) and Invisible Cities (1972), may ...”

“... Fiction which do not seem to fit definition or common patterns at all: most familiarly, C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet Trilogy. This has space travel in two volumes out of three, once arranged scientifically, once angelically. It also has a very clear attack on Wells/Darwin (or at any rate on Wellsian Darwinists, as ...”

“... and found it depressingly ponderous. To be sure, that particular section included a couple of Lewis Carroll poems, but I knew these already. The general tone was the wordy waggishness of Punch of that period, and the themes wholly adult: lovesick swains, tobacco, golf. Occasional exercises in this genre have crept into the Christopher Logue selection. The ...”

“... of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not quite proper that distinguished experts should have contributed to a volume entitled ...”

“... if you had known what to look for, just as you would have spotted his counterpart in MI5, Sir John Lewis Jones, in the honours list immediately prior to that). What, then, is the point of the fantastic governmental mumbo-jumbo with which the British ‘Secret Service’ surrounds itself? Although it is a rather youthful bureaucratic invention, only about ...”

“... the local football club, Summertown Stars, and sent me to the local Church of England school, St Philip and St James. I was already a competitive, sport-obsessed child, and responded to the sense of cultural difference by exaggerating it. During a classroom discussion – I can’t remember about what exactly – I quoted the great Green Bay Packers football ...”

“... to which the testimony of famous alumni has contributed. Guardian readers have now been told that Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis called their Old English texts ‘ape’s bum-fodder’. But if these readers get no further than the preface to the Companion, they will see what another Oxford wit, W.H. Auden, said of the same material: ‘I was spellbound. This ...”

“... the early chapters of their autobiographies, Coleridge, Hardy, Yeats, Sassoon, Graves, Day Lewis, Spender and MacNeice have a good deal to say about the external circumstances of their family lives, but little about their internal or “writerly” lives.’ That is true, though some of these poets have left us evidence of their methods of ...”