“... that he is reworking a cliché about Irishness. As Oliver MacDonagh put it, quoting Lloyd George, in States of Mind (1983), his magnificent study of the mutual bewilderment that has chiefly constituted Anglo-Irish relations, ‘while the English do not remember any history, the Irish forget none’ – a ‘familiar facetiousness’, he went on, which ...”

“... He was trying, sometimes precisely and sometimes with unbelievable slackness, to tell us, like George Meredith in his day, what he knew about ‘modern love’, and to find narrative forms that suited his slippery subject. The point is that the slackness may be as important as the precision; and that there are whole reaches of the novels that are neither ...”

“... version was commissioned for a production at the Old Vic but was turned down by director Jonathan Miller, and a straightforward translation by Eric Korn was used instead. It’s not hard to see Miller’s objections. Beyond fulfilling the basic plot requirements, 1953 barely connects with Racine at all. It brims over with ...”

“... Smith, Frederick Prokosch, Edith Wharton, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Love Peacock and Henry Miller: ‘If he often sounded like the village idiot, that was because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.’ But alongside the blessings, kicks and curses is a running lament for the novel, which Vidal sees as being in deep trouble. From 1956 ...”

“... on her return to Wimpole Street (‘I want to be with you all,’ she wrote to her brother George, ‘– none away but those whom God has taken’), though once safely ensconced there, she set herself to conform as closely as possible to the paternal will. By retreating to the security of her room, she could not only keep her father from losing ...”

“... The Founding Fathers of the United States were mainly Southerners: between them, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison can take credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, winning the Revolutionary War, and preserving America’s independence through its turbulent early decades ...”

“... wing of the Venezuelan opposition ever since Hugo Chávez was first elected in 1998. In 2002, the George W. Bush administration backed a failed coup attempt against Chávez, and supported the opposition’s bid to force his removal first through a general strike in 2002-3 and then through a recall referendum in 2004. In 2015, two years after Chávez’s death ...”

“... going. We got the book, and in due course Konishi arrived to spend 15 months at Stanford (when Sir George Sansom was writing his history of Japan there). From Konishi’s elaboration and our collaboration a book appeared called Japanese Court Poetry. Using the knowledge (and filing system) of a lifetime, Konishi is writing a 600-page book a year. The ...”

“... most vivid in ‘7, Middagh Street’. 7, Middagh Street was the three-storey brownstone rented by George Davis – literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar at the time – and tenanted by Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee; shorter-term residents included Louis MacNeice, Auden’s lover Chester Kallman and Salvador Dali. The poem ...”

“... born on its outskirts in 1932 – provided the background to her early books. But in the view of George Melly, also from the city, it left her and her prose with something more fundamental: a specific flavour. As a jolly man who loved to sing the blues, Melly, not quoted here, was in a good position to assess a particular Liverpudlian trait: that of ...”

“... real interests? Twenty years ago New Labour thought devolution would reinvigorate Britishness. As George Robertson, one of Blair’s Scottish lieutenants, put it, devolution was meant to ‘kill nationalism stone dead’. It didn’t quite work out like that in Scotland, and south of the border voters proved uninterested in the regional assemblies floated as ...”

“... after the false, material and murderous revolution ushered in by 1789. Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller and Paul de Man see something profoundly representative in Wordsworth’s sudden retreat from the public to the private sphere – the threshold of modernity, the moment when the political and social goals of history become either unrealisable or ...”

“... history is one of those heartwarming stories of literary virtue rewarded. Her first book, Poor George (1967), generated considerable critical excitement. Desperate Characters (1970) was described as ‘brilliant’ by Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe; Lionel Trilling called it ‘reserved and beautifully realised’. Six years later Karl ...”

“... Here’s his 1970s list: Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather (1 & 2), The Conversation, McCabe and Mrs Miller, California Split, Nashville, Chinatown, The Long Goodbye, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, Carrie, The Fury, The French Connection, The Exorcist, Klute, The Parallax View, Jaws, Close Encounters of ...”

“... Legión Británica played a conspicuous part in several of Bolívar’s battles; it was a Captain George Brown who raised the patriot standard over Spanish lines after Sucre’s victory at Ayacucho in December 1824, the battle that clinched independence. Bolívar liked his British officers: a Union Jack catches the eye in the fresco that adorns the Pantheon ...”