“... the longer, posher vowels of my mother, who was born and brought up in Surrey. Her father, Grandad Wallace, had been a miner in Barnsley. One day, the story goes, he got on his bicycle and cycled down south. He reached Ashtead, in Surrey, saw a pretty lane overhung with trees, and said he was never going back. My mother still ended up in Yorkshire – and in ...”

“... allowed only 45 pages out of 390 in J.E. Neale’s Queen Elizabeth (1934), a mere 26 out of 447 in Wallace MacCaffrey’s Elizabeth I (1993): which is as much as to say that those were not biographies at all, for one does not have to be a Freudian to know that what happens to you before you are 25 matters more than anything which follows. Those early years ...”

“... course, exactly how events and memory both proceed: associatively, digressing, jolting, looping. William Burroughs makes the same point when discussing his cut-up technique: ‘Take a walk down a city street … You have seen a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of ...”

“... some sense of it all. Burns was in love with anybody who bravely rose against established power: Wallace, the old Covenanters, Prince Charles Edward, Washington, Mirabeau and maybe even Danton. It was the means – the act of rebellion – rather than the motley ends which made his heart thump. While Burns enjoyed making his pen run away with him in his ...”

“... a cousin and former lover of the once successful but now forgotten Victorian historical novelist William Ainsworth. The deadliness of Ainsworth’s prose is a running joke, and it enables several asides of the ‘don’t whatever you do write a historical novel’ kind, as well as various self-conscious observations about the horrors of literary ...”

“... admired by – many of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance: Alain Locke, Arna Bontemps, Wallace Thurman and Hurston. Patronage was also forthcoming: Charlotte Mason, a white widow in her seventies who dreamed of founding ‘The Harlem Museum of African Art’, began not only inviting him to her Park Avenue apartment and having him squire her to ...”

“... raped by one of his associates. This charge appears in a summary of phone recordings written by William C. Sullivan, one of Hoover’s lieutenants. Experts on King’s career have questioned the reliability of Sullivan’s account. Like Hoover, Sullivan was committed to ‘completely discredit[ing] King as the leader of the Negro people’. A judge has ...”

“... on her fellow student Peggy James, Mary ‘courted’ her too (‘courted’ is Leavell’s word): William James’s daughter was very much ‘our kind’, and since Mary expected her family to live together always, she could only assume that Peggy would be joining the household – whether as Marianne’s partner or Warner’s was immaterial. But Marianne’s ...”

“... years.One example is McGurl’s discussion of ‘meta-slave narrative’, a genre illustrated by William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), the first-person novelisation of a historical account left by a rebel slave awaiting execution. By ‘refusing the perspectival limitations imposed by his own whiteness,’ McGurl claims, Styron’s novel ...”

“... as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... McCarthy, whose first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1966, but we continue to ignore William Eastlake, who worked (Go in Beauty and Portrait of an Artist with 26 Horses) a parallel seam with equal distinction. To be read, a player, a part of the buzz, you need to be given away with copies of Esquire magazine. (McCarthy was an established ...”

“... on the boardwalk aren’t Adorno or Arendt, but Robert McNamara and the Kilgorean figure of William Westmoreland. This volume bears little sign of the bourgeois deviationism to which Marcuse fell prey in the Forties, though it may be coming in one of the promised sequels. These were, after all, the years when Marcuse excogitated Eros and ...”

“... this. Stravinsky, too, from Petrushka on, developed a style based on repetition and variation, and Wallace Stevens quite consciously developed variation rather than sonata form, as Hockney sensed when he decided to make his own variations on Stevens’s variations on Picasso’s ‘Man with the Blue Guitar’. The ‘Las Meninas’ series and especially the ...”

“... futile and meaningless – that man is ‘a finite piece of reasonable misery’, in the words of William Drummond of Hawthornden, a good poet who was also a great plagiarist, and a great seeker of shelter in books – but that an absolute order might be felt for, or invented. That order was eventually discovered in the teachings of Christianity. When he ...”

“... to withdrawal in Vietnam was meant to ‘neutralise’ supporters of the Southern Democrat George Wallace, who was trying to get the 1972 nomination. If Nixon pulled out too quickly, he warned, Wallace’s 13 per cent of the 1968 vote – he had run as an independent candidate on a segregationist ticket and split the ...”