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“... The philosopher asks: Can the style of an evil man have any unity?’ It’s a wonderfully sharp question, marrying morals to aesthetics in a challenging new-old fashion. And it’s a question, as ever with John Banville, within other questions. Who, for instance, you’re made to wonder at this point in Ghosts, is actually asking? Some anonymous narrator? The author? The novel’s own enigmatic ‘evil man’, the one who does so much of its telling and, it turns out, has a lot morally to answer for? You never know ...”

“... as a young man was a novel of yours. I’d never seen anything like it.’ My interlocutor was Valentine Cunningham and he had been invited to the party because I’d quoted in my memoir a remark of his, in the TLS, about a subsequent book of mine: ‘There is even a case to be made for Giles Gordon being the only true inheritor of the late ...”

“... his lover to us. I was reminded of the power of this passage, in all its strange tactility, by Valentine Cunningham’s too brief discussion of it at the climax of Reading after Theory. For the most part his book is a polemical but unsurprising survey of the strengths and drawbacks of Theory as it has influenced literary study in the last few ...”

“... journalists, men of astonishing energy and dedication like Churton Collins (here dealt with by Valentine Cunningham) were fighting for appointment to the newly created chairs of English literature. John Sutherland provides a historical sketch to show that the literary as opposed to the linguistic appointments at UCL have often gone to people with a ...”

“... Using the same set of ‘indeterminate, disject facts’ that Kermode shaped into a love story, Valentine Cunningham constructs something very different. British Writers of the Thirties marshals everything there is to know about the literary Thirties into an extraordinary and indispensable resource. Cunningham has ...”

“... English Faculty in Oxford. In a recent piece in the Oxford Magazine called ‘Reading English’ Valentine Cunningham proposes the abolition of compulsory Old English as part of a reform of the post-Medieval syllabus. Those who think as he does appear to see Old and Modern as implacable rivals, or at least as de rigueur alternatives. It is a spurious ...”

“... a bus driver for the sake of publicity,’ he said, ‘I shall despise them.’ The Booker judge Valentine Cunningham explained that ‘all the women liked the bus driver’ and sneeringly described the book as ‘quite ordinary and evening-class’. The novel is ill-served by these caricatures and is quite a bit more interesting than its ...”

“... whether of the Daily Worker or of the Daily Mail’. The Daily Worker’s role in Spain was one of Valentine Cunningham’s targets in the astringent introduction to his earlier anthology The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse. Cuningham noted the paper’s slavering desire for martyrs and its cynical distortion of facts, and he held up for scorn the ...”

“... was a lady or a woman is hard to say. In a busily energetic, impressively wide-ranging chapter, Valentine Cunningham lavishes the customary critical praise on her conception of human life as sprawling, contingent and delightfully muddled. This delight in messiness was not in fact confined to her art, as Martin Amis points out in a brief, reprinted ...”

“... interesting pieces: one by John Coombes on Orwell’s despised Popular Front, and one by Valentine Cunningham on the famous pamphlet ‘Authors take sides in the Spanish War’. The second collection is much more interesting because it contains material by survivors: in fact, it is dedicated to a vindication of the ‘radical culture’ of the ...”

“... what he was doing, Cage’s marriage was falling apart. He had fallen in love with Merce Cunningham, whom he had first met back at Cornish. In a vain concession to marital fidelity the two men attempted a ménage à trois with Xenia, but Cage’s sexual preference was all too obvious, and she was slowly, inexorably frozen out. Cage’s compunction ...”