“... to the co-op board on behalf of his agent, Andrew Wylie? Or that Roth’s friend Joel Conarroe read a goofy telegram at Roth’s sixtieth birthday bash purportedly from John Updike that began ‘Masel gov, you alte cocker’?), but it concretises the sense of comprehensiveness to an impressive, even irritating degree. Roth’s elysian childhood in ...”

“... the shame of the thing, was evident.’ Americans reacted politically to what they saw and read. Congress passed laws that utterly changed the South, so that blacks now vote freely and hold political office – and it is a region that looks to the future instead of the past. It was an astonishing social change, and it happened in part because the press ...”

“... the book consists of letters: two to Sarah; several to ‘P – ’, who is Hazlitt’s confidant Peter George Patmore; and three to ‘J.S.K. – ’, or James Sheridan Knowles, recounting the final, farcical agonies of the affair. But the printed Liber Amoris is not the only source. There is a manuscript copy of Part One with additions and emendations in ...”

“... need to do so, grew marketable apples, kept hens, geese and bees. For the house built for him by Peter Harland, he involved himself, following good arts and crafts tradition, in the choice of timbers, bricks and pavings, insisting on the inclusion of local flints. He was devoted to the Newbury Players, the strictly amateur orchestra he ...”

“... bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal Theatre was giving a premiere, a one-act play ...”

“... Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers Paul Read similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The service is conducted by Father Kit Cunningham who talks about Anna, saying how she had summoned him to the ...”

“... romances, ‘the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness’. Humberstall, who has to read the stuff, says resentfully: ‘Twasn’t as if there was anythin’ to ’em, either. I know. I had to read ‘em.’ But in the course of time, because the books are involved with the memory of the only class-free ...”

“... time from a visit to the Scotia Bar in Stockwell Street, where the dissidents met now and then to read their work and shout down the official festival. The group adopted the name Workers’ City – which spelled out their opposition to that recently developed area around Blackfriars and Ingram Street known as Merchant City – and set about picketing some ...”

“... to, Monty Johnstone’s is a name that recurs, along with the philosopher Hyman (Hymie) Levy, Peter Fryer the journalist, and Brian Pearce, well known today as a translator of historical works from French and Russian. Levy she remembers as a very persuasive public speaker, whose Edinburgh accent ‘made everything sound reasonable’. Her observation post ...”

“... part of 18th-century European culture – and as part of ‘high culture’, in ways outlined by Peter Burke and Robert Darnton. Science and technology can then be distinguished, and theoretical advances, in, say, the earth sciences, are not assumed always to have produced great practical breakthroughs. As one of the contributors, Steven Shapin, neatly turns ...”

“... Stoic mistrust of the body, of instinct, of the irrational. Yet he was probably the most widely read and influential thinker of his time. Kings and cardinals queued and competed for his company. Philip II of Spain made him historiographer royal. Rubens, his devoted pupil, painted him as the modern Seneca; and it was through the medium of Lipsius’s edition ...”

“... that are subtly unfamiliar to the rest of the Western world.’ Any one who has tried to read the Colombian novel A Hundred Days of Solitude – popular as that mysteriously was in its English translation – must surely endorse Hough’s account of the difficulties that confront us, not much less with South American poems than with South or Central ...”

“... Another, more recent antecedent of which Salaman seems to be aware is that of the Australian Peter Carey’s very comparable Bliss (1981), whose ad-man hero Harry Joy revives at the start after being clinically dead for nine minutes, and returns, winded, to his former way of life, deprived of his former breezy ‘optimism’, even suspecting that he is ...”

“... but was forcibly led away by his staff.‘In less time than a written account of it takes to read, the Battle of Culloden, or Drummossie Moor, was over … What followed for the rest of the afternoon would be unopposed, defenceless slaughter.’ The Jacobite dead and wounded on the battlefield are thought to have numbered between fifteen hundred and two ...”

“... of 14-year-old schoolboys, so fantastically improbable does its success still appear. It required Peter Taylor, a burly, buzz-cut ex-marine, to convince Japanese immigration officials that he was in Osaka to perform with the violinist Taro Hakase. It featured a wad of $10,000 yen tied in a hairband to ‘tip’ a departure gate official in Osaka. And it ...”