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“... with the lid of a trunk – and proposes a candidate for Saki’s heir by way of its illustrator, Quentin Blake. The spikiness of Blake’s line suits the spikiness of Saki’s universe, but also suggests a kinship between Saki and the writer most associated with Blake: Roald ...”

“... kind of illustration, which would once have defined the word, is now quite uncommon. The covers Quentin Blake did for Penguin fiction in the 1960s fall into this category. He writes of the books he worked on that ‘they had to be read with a certain degree of inwardness and what I produced was, for better or worse, more like illustration than a cover ...”

“... with the pretty china on the dresser. So one is almost too grateful to turn to John Yeoman’s and Quentin Blake’s The Wild Washerwomen, and should say at once that the drawings show no astounding virtuosity in the re-creation of textures, that the words have no overtones of poetry, that it aims only to tell a funny story with a twist in the end, and ...”

“... his lovely dad getting their own back on a rich snob.It​ was a publisher’s masterstroke to use Quentin Blake as Dahl’s main illustrator from 1978 onwards, since Blake’s spiky-scrawly but underlyingly happy pen and wash drawings make you believe that Dahl’s characters are similarly rough around the edges with ...”

“... The publisher’s note on the jacket of George’s Marvellous Medicine says that ‘Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was voted No 1 (above Winnie the Pooh, Lord of the Rings and Alice in Wonderland) in a Sunday Times survey to find the best ten children’s books.’ Even if the word ‘best’ is translated into reasonable terms (‘currently most popular’?), the claim remains impressive, and implies classic status ...”

“... reason to be grateful to Maschler. Children, too: it was his inspiration to pair up Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake. His thumbprints are everywhere on British literary culture. It is evident from letters quoted in his book that Maschler inspires loyalty and affection from his authors – not least from Blake, who has ...”

“... I have seen just under two dozen reviews and interviews, including two reviews of reviews by ‘Quentin Oates’ in the Bookseller, and seen or heard several broadcast interviews and discussions. Time-limits ruled out an exhaustive listing even, I suspect, of material which actually appeared before I had to stop looking. Even so, the figures reveal an ...”

“... by a man exactly his own age and with the same long clowning lines and flared nostrils of a Quentin Blake drawing, smiles and cigarillos in a well-defended study, a thatch of white hair. ‘New Updike,’ he might think, with a little uptick of a tricky heart, as he came across a trifling piece in the New Yorker, a meatier story in Playboy, a new ...”

“... it becomes more difficult to dismiss with complete assurance the suggestion that, as William Blake wonderfully expressed it, Milton may have been of the devil’s party without knowing ...”

“... may change their meaning in the course of this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning. Walter Benjamin believed that ...”

“... son a girl’s name, because he thinks it’ll toughen him up. When Cash sings it live, on At San Quentin, you can hear the prison inmates go wild; goodness only knows what they’d have done had he decided to perform his version of the excruciatingly sentimental barbershop favourite, ‘Daddy Sang Bass’. Despite his carefully cultivated outlaw image – he ...”

“... the family house in Dorset. Her great-grandfather, Isaac Butts, had been the patron of William Blake, and her father gave her daily lessons in observation in the Blake Room, which housed 34 of his water-colours, engravings, portraits and sketches. In 1905, however, her father died and nine months later the contents of ...”

“... am being unfair, for many of the essays in the volume – on the development of Parliament (Robert Blake), ‘War and Peace with Wales, Scotland and Ireland’ (Hugh Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising ...”

“... Wilson is by no means wholly allergic to communal ideas of liberty. In fact, he follows Quentin Skinner in claiming that negative freedom will remain precarious unless citizens have the power to hold rulers to account, which requires some more positive notion of political rights. He also sees the Civil War period as an invaluable infusion of ...”

“... for our meeting – were not necessarily about Raymond Williams at all. With the exception of Quentin Skinner, with whom, by his own account, Inglis seems to be in more or less continuous converse, the interviews are almost all one-off affairs, a procedure increasingly unacceptable to the oral historian, and almost guaranteed to provide stereotyped ...”