“... but not all there: a man of hollow promises, fundamentally unreliable. Sometimes he seemed to be little more than a lazy impersonator of his own cherished self-image – airy, cunning, one of life’s happy drifters. He ended up in the penitentiary, following a poor attempt at forgery. If he’d only been a tiny bit smarter, he might have made one hell of a ...”

“... of 1991. (Some of these women serve on more than one board, which makes the statistics look a little brighter than they actually are.) There was really no need for the scare movie Baby Boom, which showed a bright career woman giving up her unnatural, highly paid working life in the boardroom, brought to her senses by having to take charge of a baby. The ...”

“... are recognisable. Let’s begin by crashing the shop talk of the cluster of film pioneers – Allan Dwan, Lillian Gish, King Vidor, Hoot Gibson, Edith Head – who remember Hollywood as ‘a virtual wilderness’, when Sunset Boulevard was unpaved and pictures were called ‘galloping tintypes’. In those carefree early years, Hollywood was an Eden of ...”

“... ever failed to get him to do so.’ Rider Haggard, in turn, obviously used Selous as a basis for Allan Quatermain in King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Like Selous, ‘Quatermain hunts trouserless and fortifies himself with cold tea.’ Then ‘life imitated art once again.’ Selous, in successive books, ‘sounded more and more like Ouatermain’. He became a ...”

“... but the aperture for the jack was ominously soft and sticky with rust. The long-suffering little car received the vertical spear in its chassis, and stayed stoically earthbound. Now I have to say that I am already on very bad terms with the inanimate world. Even when making a cup of coffee or changing a light bulb (or a fuse!), I think – what is it ...”

“... frame houses stuck like oyster shells on a hill of rock, and below us, the sea lapped the raw little match-stick mazes of a weir, where the fish for bait were trapped. Six years later, Bishop sent Lowell a postcard from the Art Institute of Chicago of Winslow Homer’s Marblehead – an image of two people in conversation on a coastal rock. ‘Out of all ...”

“... in Greenwich Village, and through one of the actresses there met and began taking classes with Allan Miller, a disciple of Lee Strasberg. She auditioned for Strasberg’s Actors Studio aged sixteen, and though she didn’t get in they encouraged her to try again later; piqued, she never did. When she left school in January 1960, she had her first role ...”

“... no more’.The phrase has had several lives. It first appeared in a song by the Edinburgh poet Allan Ramsay published in 1724:Farewell to Lochaber, farewell to my JeanWhere heartsome wi’ her I ha’e many days beenFor Lochaber no more, Lochaber no moreWe’ll maybe return to Lochaber no more.The words were matched to an old melody, possibly ...”

“... volumes, have tended to leave the peninsula well alone. Out there, reality was always in need of a little cosmetic enhancement. Design buffs on the Millennium Experience payroll see the sorry isthmus with its muddy horizons, its earth-movers and excavators, its razor-wire fences and surveillance cameras, as an Arcadian grotto. They have no problem with ...”

“... death: for example, in his 1987 back-to-the-Greeks book. The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom called Dewey ‘a big baby’. Childishness – in the form of a lack of humility and a tendency to power-worship – continues to be the most frequent charge brought against post-Deweyan pragmatist philosophers. The whole tradition from Peirce to ...”

“... was weak and prone to illness. Fred defended him, however, punching an Irishman who said that his little brother looked like a girl when he skated. Cheever opened his story ‘The National Pastime’: ‘To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.’ His uncle, when he saw him, said: ‘Well, I guess ...”

“... by the urge to build the maximum number of new homes than by the urge to make as much (or lose as little) money as possible.Pat Quinn was born into the final waning of the old East End, where working-class Londoners rented rooms in cramped, crowded, badly maintained terraced houses with poor plumbing and sanitation. Aged twenty, just married, Quinn and her ...”

“... Such lists can be dispiriting, and it could be said of this one that it had too little Shakespeare and no short poems at all (in such contexts, ‘great’ means ‘long’). But though there were omissions, there were no silly inclusions; Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry ...”

“... Two, the French had rejected psychoanalysis as a German inspiration; after the war it fared only a little bit better with a new image as an American import. In the Sixties, all this seemed to change. A growing thirst for things psychoanalytic became a hallmark of French intellectual life. Ready to satisfy it was the brand of psychoanalytic thinking embodied in ...”

“... A patriarchal nimbus settled on Bellow in his later years that remains unique, inspiring, a little weird, a bit Holy Ghost. Attending Bellow’s readings at the 92nd Street Y was a form of religious observance. According to Atlas, ‘going to hear Bellow wasn’t a social event: it was an act of witness.’ Being on the receiving end of such reverence ...”