“... New York but Minneapolis, where the behaviourist B.F. Skinner worked, and where, since 1969, Thomas Bouchard has taught a course on the ‘measurement’ of individual personalities and twins. ‘Not every university offers such a course,’ Bouchard has remarked, ‘in part because race, gender and class differences are closely compared, which arouses ...”

“... of a great good place to write. Friends and acquaintances pop up for a paragraph and drop out: Thomas Wolfe, Gary Cooper, millionaire sportsmen – a parade of guests at Key West who booze, fish, admire the great man and leave. To Reynolds’s Hemingway nothing really mattered except writing well. Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa are read ...”

“... what fun Bunny had’ – as if his job stopped at sourcing the raw material for a story.Paul Thomas Anderson therefore had room to experiment when he adapted the novel for the screen as There Will Be Blood (2007). His protagonist, Daniel Plainview (the role for which Daniel Day-Lewis won his second Oscar), is a much ...”

“... obstacle to the historical understanding of Burke has been the extraordinary detestation which Sir Lewis Namier conceived for him and all his works, and which was transmitted to Namier’s authoritatively placed disciples. He is right to combat this, because it took the form of persistent denigration of Burke’s character and motives; unfortunately, he has ...”

“... peers of both Modernists and Georgians; and no reader could then have been blamed for thinking Day-Lewis, say, as important as Auden and the same kind of poet. If in 1820 there had been an anthology of the Cockney school, the poetic romances of Keats in it would not have seemed so different from those of Leigh Hunt. Already the pages of Alvarez’s The New ...”

“... The administration had its own intellectual cheerleaders and experts on the Middle East: Bernard Lewis, for instance, whose pet conviction that ‘in that part of the world, nothing matters more than resolute will and force’ was validated by the swift capitulation of the Taliban. Iraq was logically the next target. As the columnist ...”

“... living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of itself,’ he says in his Study of Thomas Hardy, a sentiment which might have been uttered by John Stuart Mill himself. But what Lawrence meant by ‘self’ was not to be confused with the ‘cheap egotism’ of the ‘self-conscious little ego’ described by modern individualism. ‘I know that ...”

“... around certain pubs in Soho, Fitzrovia or the immediate environs of Broadcasting House. Dylan Thomas was much in use as an actor and a voice as well as a writer. A guest list for a Features party planned in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael ...”

“... system that had once been popular with students and sermon note-takers, and was later used by Thomas Jefferson. Pepys had included a tachygraphy manual in the Bibliotheca Pepysiana, and Tomalin concludes that poor Smith ‘carried out the entire task without knowing that the key to the shorthand was in the library’. Loveman’s careful analysis of the ...”

“... constituencies, fathom the reality behind the polemics of Cobbett and the satire of Dickens and Thomas Love Peacock. These six volumes are crammed with comédie humaine and the parliamentary puppetry that seems, as Blake said, something other than human life. There’s also a masterly volume of summary and analysis by the editor, David Fisher, who dislikes ...”

“... has more Nobel laureates per capita than anywhere else in the world. The other winner was Arthur Lewis, who took the economics prize in 1979. Walcott won his in 1992. By happy coincidence they share a birthday and the government makes a fuss of its favoured children with a Nobel Laureate Week each January. Asked my business at the airport on my way to record ...”

“... up onto the rougher, more English ground of Povington Hill. The heath still resembles the one Thomas Hardy imagined as Lear’s, but it is now part of the Royal Armoured Corps’s gunnery range: enclosed and blasted in a new sense. The road goes up past the turf-covered rings of Flower’s Barrow, and then turns off towards Worbarrow Bay. Along with the ...”

“... the livery of the messenger. When, now and again, an author does allude to the look of a page (Lewis Carroll’s ‘Mouse’s Tale’, Sterne’s marbled interfoliations) it is intended to be cheeky – as a flunky, standing behind the speaker’s chair at a grand dinner, would sound if invited to interject. Typography, the advocates of transparency ...”

“... the precious capacity for resistance that the fawning victims lose. A similar structure appears in Thomas Mann’s great story ‘Mario and the Magician’, where a hypnotist can impose his will on everyone who has no counter-wish to set against his. The boy in the story is not named, but is usually assumed to be Titus Groan, because he has run away from a ...”

“... and the debris of the New Economy,1 but they are also, at their best, characters out of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, the sort of people who get up in the morning and count their change and wonder who they are. Yet something new did occur in the 1990s, and this newness is something the Franzen-type wants to approach at the level of the sentence. It ...”