“... my reading predictably widened in its range, but it hardly deepened. Joyce, Hardy, Dickens, Camus, George Eliot, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, Byron, Auden, Pound, T.S. Eliot … At 16 I was a chain-reader, on a steady three library books a day when not in school, but my ...”

“... Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the ...”

“... late 18th century, they did so partly by mimicking existing Indian élites. A Nigerian souvenir of George V’s jubilee superimposes their majesties’ heads onto bodies sketched out in conventional Islamic fashion, converting the King Emperor and his consort into something very different from their squat Anglo-Germanic selves. Even when British aesthetics ...”

“... the stabs and screeches in Psycho), could pursue some musicological research. Babitz wrote a Daisy Miller-inspired novel, which Heller sent to his publisher: it was turned down. Deciding to be a groupie instead, she raced through the LA art and music scenes. ‘In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz,’ Earl McGrath, later the president of Rolling ...”

“... William Pritchard, Eric Homberger, Michael O’Neill, Rachel Buxton) and the memoirists (Karl Miller, Anthony Thwaite, Robert Conquest), though several of them can lay claim to more than one of these identities. Varied though the essays are in both approach and theme, certain emphases recur. Perhaps the most interesting, urged by several of the ...”

“... forging a ‘hero image of Castro, in which all the virtues of Robin Hood and Thomas Jefferson, of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, were contained in a single man’. Matthews’s series caused an uproar in Cuba: Batista himself was enraged by it, and one of his top advisers dismissed Matthews’s reporting as ‘a chapter in a fantastic ...”

“... Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of meaning across a page, that he exasperates some of his opponents with his ...”

“... consider the proper way to frame contemporary debates about politics and the law.The legal scholar George Fletcher, writing about political changes in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, called the rule of law the most puzzling ‘of all the dreams that drive men and women into the streets’. There were huge protests in Israel last year over ...”

“... altogether. Such, no doubt, is how Christopher Hitchens will be remembered. The resemblances to George Orwell, on whom Hitchens has written so admiringly,* are obvious enough, though so are some key differences. Orwell was a kind of literary proletarian who lived in dire straits for most of his life, and began to earn serious money from his writing only ...”

“... was specially arranged to suit his sense of its importance, presided over by Michael Chertoff, George W. Bush’s appointee as head of the Department of Homeland Security, and conducted on Jefferson’s birthday at the Jefferson Memorial. ‘There was a very stiff breeze blowing across the Tidal Basin,’ Hitchens recalls, ‘but it served to give a real ...”

“... Naughtie, Nigel Slater and David Hare, who claims that the best conjunction he’s seen so far is George Steiner talking to Joan Collins.Come away at eight o’clock with HMQ still at it, and the policemen in the forecourt very jolly and eating ice cream.1 June. John Horder dies at 92, who, after a succession of bad doctors at university and in New York, was ...”

“... Havel once, I seem to be the only playwright not personally acquainted with the deceased Arthur Miller and with some line on his life and work. Many of his plays I still haven’t seen, though years ago when I was reading everything I could get hold of on America and McCarthyism I came across Miller’s novel Focus, in ...”

“... Mrs and Miss should be a minor typographical variant of the shorthand for ‘manuscript’. Casey Miller and Kate Swift, in Words and Women (1976), say Ms has been around since the 1940s, but remained largely unused and didn’t get into a dictionary until 1972. One factor in its resurgence was ‘the growth of direct mail selling’, for which the ...”

“... be huge. Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, phoned him early to report: ‘It’s happening.’ Jason Miller, his senior election adviser, tweeted: ‘It’s happening.’ By 10 p.m. Trump was convinced he had triumphed, with plenty to spare. At 10.30 he took a call from Karl Rove, former election guru to ...”

“... teachers of English – about 10 per cent of the total. They include the founder of the LRB, Karl Miller. What is clear from both Hilliard’s and Ellis’s books is Leavis’s influence in English departments outside the UK. Hilliard gives the former students’ names and destinations (Canada, South Africa, Australia – only one to the United States) and ...”