“... the book is constructed in a series of emotional confrontations, the chapters being given (as in Henry James’s ‘dramatic’ novel, The Awkward Age) the names of the leading actors in each, and the ‘awkward age’ being in this case nearer 67 than 17. The plot concerns retirement and homecoming, ending and reconciliation, and the Welsh setting as Amis ...”

“... dependency like America. The most conspicuous instance was Eliot’s hero (and Boston’s own) Henry James, followed by Pound himself, Gertrude Stein, and just recently, that robustly American figure Robert Frost who, with his wife and children, had in 1913 taken up residence outside London, and from there, with Pound’s assistance and to considerable ...”

“... but that is a hazard no truly distinctive stylist avoids. Not often in American writing since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force. Jameson’s preference for a conditional over a declarative mood is a token of the necessarily speculative quality of what he does. It’s far easier to be sure that culture ...”

“... liberated, was horrified: ‘There is in her displeasure, as there was in her father’s, a power of bringing one into bondage … I catch myself acting as of old, in a sort of dull slave spirit.’ Eventually Maggie tipped into mania, attempting suicide and having to be forcibly restrained. She spent eight years in nursing homes before dying at the age ...”

“... and Peace is also a function of the fact that the Russian Empire was an already constituted great power, which victory in 1812 simply conserved as it was. Behind the novel was not an impulse of emancipation, but of displaced compensation. Smarting from Russian humiliation in the Crimean War, where the troops of Napoleon III had stormed Sebastopol under his ...”

“... of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death – ‘the monumental ruggedness of his face, its deep furrows like plough marks crossing a field’. Probably the most beautiful and attentive drawing had been done five years earlier by ...”

“... also infringed the right to roam, creating a claustrophobic environment, marked and ribbed by power and wealth. But Clare, unlike Burns, opposed those he called ‘the French Levellers’ – he saw the Revolutionaries as analogous to rapacious English enclosers – and in 1808 he joined the Eastern regiment of the Northampton militia. His military ...”

“... into a black man’s point of view – in the morally strident 1960s, in the heyday of the Black Power movement, Updike was taking a risk,’ Begley writes. ‘A load of coercive self-righteousness (what today we would call political correctness),’ he adds, ‘could easily have landed on Updike had Skeeter, and the graphic descriptions of Skeeter having ...”

“...  Henry James​’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... The end in Vietnam was more enigmatic. Either the world’s strongest military and economic power was defeated by a Third World country with less than a fifth of America’s population – a military miracle – or, even more shameful, the US abandoned a small ally it had solemnly sworn to defend. ‘If we are driven from the field in ...”

“... thing was just to read, non-stop, books that were never available in Pakistan: D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Isaac Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy, Trotsky himself, other Bolshevik leaders, many others. So for me Oxford was very liberating and on many fronts. When I came to Britain, it was obvious that the United States had taken over the function of the old ...”

“... uses two remorselessly productive diarists to cast light on very different class experiences. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon was dead at 61, nine years before the 1967 Act decriminalised the kind of affairs he’d been having before, during and after his marriage to the fabulously wealthy Honor Guinness. Parker gives us extracts from Chips’s diaries, during ...”

“... Britain was back in Roman Europe.The second break with Europe was English rather than British. Henry VIII’s decision to ‘take back control’ from faceless foreign cardinals and unelected popes was an immense event, tearing apart the seamless robe of European Catholic Christendom and shaping English reservations about the Continent for five ...”

“... told his early lover Pamela Hansford Johnson. ‘I’m like a baby in the dark,’ he explained to Henry Treece, an Apocalyptic poet who wrote the first critical book about him, and with whom Thomas had a long and revealing correspondence. Being infantile was useful as a would-be disarming way of acknowledging his worldly incompetence: ‘These apologies, we ...”

“... had held Tory ideas about the authority of the Church of England and the supremacy of landowning power his entire life, and his new position as Harley’s propagandist was merely the public assumption of a politics that was natural to him. ‘He was putting on, rather than changing, his coat,’ Stubbs writes. One of his most extraordinary coups while at the ...”