“... done by a graduate student, which began with an authoritative statement: ‘The work of William Shakespeare was evenly matched with many other authors in Elizabethan and Jacobean society, but modern opinion emphasises his importance as the finest playwright in Western culture.’ Modern opinion can now at last be seen to be false. But where shall we ...”

“... raw data and turns them into a news piece. The prose is not Updikean, but it’s better than E.L. James, and it gets the job done, since that job is very narrowly defined: to tell readers what Apple’s results are. The thing is, though, that quite a few traditionally white-collar jobs are in essence just as mechanical and formulaic as writing a news story ...”

“... his erstwhile fiancée, Ethne. All this gets pretty tedious and repetitive and rather Henry James-like in its moral ramifications. It’s gone through so often that one wonders whether the repetition is because the book came out originally in serial form. Each chapter certainly has a subheading: ‘Durrance hears news of Faversham’; ‘The House of ...”

“... was, in a phrase Amis the reviewer used in speaking of one of the forerunners of this fashion (William Cooper’s Scenes from Provincial Life), ‘non-cosmic and non-operatic; entirely believable’. Commercially, Amis was the most successful of the group. Success brought him more drinking companions in London and the money to keep up with them. It also ...”

“... fate. The centralisation is one of the principal things that attracts freebooting tycoons like Sir James Dyson and Sir Jim Ratcliffe, along with the press barons, to the Brexit cause. As Rupert Murdoch, always more candid than his fellows, once remarked, the trouble with the EU was that you never knew who to call.All of Oborne’s books have been published in ...”

“... bad-trip imagery, like the cut-up technique Bowie used to compose the lyrics, is borrowed from William Burroughs. The title song is introduced with a toe-curling yell of: ‘This ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide!’ But that’s soon forgotten in the gloriously overlong, overripe, decadent mess of anarchic guitars, squelching horns and exuberant ...”

“... Jane Welsh Carlyle, Froude’s posthumous My Relations with Carlyle, and Alexander Carlyle and Sir James Crichton-Browne’s The Nemesis of Froude. Everyone has long since taken sides, if not with the tactless first biographer or with the vindictive and family-proud nephew then with Thomas Carlyle or with Jane, or perhaps with Carlyle with reservations, or ...”

“... Harbor – even if that respect is filtered through the figures of Prewitt, Maggio and Warden from James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, a novel that plainly means a lot to her.) Over the years since 1963, Didion has won a high reputation as a political journalist/ commentator. I’ve never been quite as sure of that talent, if only because American politics ...”

“... Patricia Bosworth notes ‘the freakishness in normalcy, the normalcy in freakishness’ in it. William Todd Schultz, in his An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus (2011), says that Arbus gave a print of the photograph to her therapist and ‘in the psychoanalytical tradition, a gift like that is a disguised admission.’ It is also the ...”

“... as Pfeffer puts it, he ingratiated himself with Israel’s champions in the American media, from William Safire, a neoconservative columnist at the New York Times, to the more debonair Zionist Ted Koppel of ABC, on whose show, Nightline, he made frequent appearances as a ‘terrorism expert’. Safire urged Israel to make Netanyahu its new ambassador when ...”

“... start at the top and do it all over again!’ Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, Jack Lemmon, James Mason and Steve McQueen all came to congratulate her after the show. When Judy Garland first heard her sing, she said: ‘I’m never going to open my mouth again.’ Frank Sinatra offered to set his goons on anyone who ‘ever bothers you’. JFK told her ...”

“... which is why Wilson felt obliged to go outside the system and call a referendum a year later. When James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party contested the 1997 general election on a pledge to put any further expansion of Brussels’s powers directly to the British people, opinion surveys indicated that more than half of voters agreed with this policy. But less than ...”

“... the allotted Uncle Tom role. This is why a young black woman identified with Marilyn Monroe. James Baldwin identified with her too, as he told Weatherby when he was introduced to him by Tennessee Williams. Not that Weatherby was the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of what might seem like odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s ...”

“... against the concealment and silence that the loss of Palestine had imposed, and that his father, William Said, had accepted, leaving behind not only the family’s past in Jerusalem but also his Arab name, Wadie. After 1967, Said embraced the Palestinian struggle – an act of ‘affiliation’, as he put it, a commitment based on belief, rather than ...”

“... his discovery that there were only 1,440 Jews in all of Palestine is not mentioned. The Reverend James Parkes is cited many times, but his evidence that the Jewish population of Jerusalem was less than a thousand in 1827, or that it formed only a third of its inhabitants by mid-century, is left out.For all her ‘bald facts’, Peters only manages to prove ...”