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“... short story for both V.S. Pritchett, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Short Stories, and Walter Allen, in his critical survey, The Short Story in English. ‘The short story,’ writes Allen, is ‘rooted in a single incident or perception’; its effect ‘is nearer to that of lyric poetry than the ...”

“... violence and corruption the raw reality of Red Harvest.’ No mean achievement. But that was it. Walter Allen is another Thirties man. Senior to Mr Symons by less than a year, he was the first boy from King Edward’s Grammar School, Ashton, ever to attempt Oxford entrance, being sent up to Balliol as a candidate for a scholarship in English ...”

“... The terms on which this book is set up are prefigured in the split title – Allen Lane: King Penguin. In Elizabethan drama the king’s two bodies might well be a theme for tragedy, and a latterday Lytton Strachey might have made much of the hypocritical discrepancies between public eminence and private person. J ...”

“... common in Birmingham than in Liverpool, Sheffield or Manchester.’ He suggests, via the writer Walter Allen (one of the few Birmingham intellectuals from a working-class background), that class consciousness might actually have been sharpened by knowing your own boss. The factory owner, for Allen, was ‘my ...”

“... University. There he was taught and befriended – as were his Birmingham contemporaries Walter Allen and Reggie Smith – by a young lecturer in the Classics Department, Louis MacNeice. Reed had a remarkable speaking voice and a gift for mimicry (and for assuming the accents of a class not his own), and as an undergraduate he acted in and ...”

“... both plaintively lovelorn, obscurely set down between Oceanian winds and water. New Zealand Verse. Walter Scott Publishing. London. New York. 1906 – Safe distances, for blushing unseen, big breaths unheard, ‘O cruel nymph’ not unwritten and much more, his drift of ‘low-blown music’ – the words, the lips, the pipes – ‘who love thee ...”

“... biography, written by one of his nieces, was a prime example of the absurdity of that custom. Walter, the second Baron Rothschild, great-great-grandson of the fortune-founding Mayer Amschel, was manifestly without any talent at all for finance, had absolutely no need to earn a living and had a younger brother who possessed in full measure the very ...”

“... a small selection was included in the prose collection In the Green Tree (1948): ‘It may be,’ Walter Allen wrote in the New Statesman, ‘that these letters will ultimately take a higher place than either the poetry or the stories for, like Keats’s, they point to a maturity beyond anything their author had been able to express in his work.’ A ...”

“... has traditionally been mocked (even by critics now as prehistoric-looking themselves as Walter Allen) as the epitome of middlebrow philistinism – on a par with the Janeite who reads Austen every year to relish her ‘wit’. This, however, is the company Wall prefers. Wall takes it for granted that Trollope must be swallowed as the boa takes ...”

“... Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft ...”

“... a sane, amusing, unintimidating introduction to the consequences of mathematical illiteracy, John Allen Paulos shows how a little arithmetic can cast light on the cohesiveness of cultures. He quotes an experiment in which the psychologist Stanley Milgrim gave each member of a randomly-selected group of people a document and a ‘target individual’ to whom ...”

“... One of his friendships I take leave to dwell on. I hadn’t known that the American poet Allen Tate, a friend of mine, was also a friend and correspondent of Fuller’s, and I was interested to learn that Allen’s widow, Helen, wrote to him saying that Tate died not of emphysema but of brain damage caused by ...”

“... past as a sort of paradise, but held it in a more than commonly lofty way, was the poet Allen Tate, the subject here of an admiringly candid memoir by Walter Sullivan. Tate’s reputation is in its posthumous slump, except perhaps in Nashville and Sewanee, but he is too interesting to stay down for ever. He was ...”

“... you feel you’re not a whole person. Fifty years separate these two extracts – the first from Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, the second from Unemployment by Jeremy Seabrook. Once again, there are three million out of work; once again, the jobless register the same feelings of apathy, humiliation and futility. Nothing has changed – and yet ...”

“... seems to have made five of them. He very probably sailed with the 1584 expedition promoted by Sir Walter Raleigh to reconnoitre sites for an English colony. He was certainly one of the party of five or six hundred men (about one hundred of them colonists) who went back in 1585. It was on that voyage that he gathered material for the American drawings. In 1587 ...”