“... a world of imagination in which she controlled everything that happened. She went on to create young women somewhat like herself, but whose perceptions and judgments were shown to matter; who were able to influence their own fates significantly, and who could even give their parents good advice. Her delight in this work is obvious. It’s pity that this ...”

“... of his local congregation, and encouraging an unbreakably strong bond with his older brother, Warren (‘Warnie’). He mostly hated his schooldays in England, but flourished under the supervision of an eccentric private coach, sufficiently so to gain a place at Oxford. For a healthy British male, November 1916 was not the best moment to have one’s 18th ...”

“... buried grandfather Anthony. In the same year Sarah’s elder sister Martha married a well-to-do young solicitor, Robert Roscoe, who had been one of their first lodgers at Southampton Buildings. This was an excellent match from the Walkers’ point of view, one they were no doubt keen to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other ...”

“... of exotic ‘prayer’ shawl draped over his expressive shoulders, smoking away, talking to eager young girls. Mike Nichols, the serpent in the garden … Claggart to the life, said not enough money was coming in just now, wanted to get unused to the money. Arthur Miller a bit tight addressing me as usual on the subject of his latest ...”

“... But against whom exactly? Born in 1899 into an old and genteel New York family – her father was Warren McVeigh, editor of the New York Sun, and her mother one of the Phelpses of Long Island – Hutchins was orphaned at an early age and raised by a grandfather and a wealthy aunt. Like the skittish Victorine, she seems to have been lonely and fantastical from ...”

“... runs: ‘if you build it, they may well come, but only as long as it’s free.’ That is why, as Warren Buffett observed, the internet is probably a ‘net negative for capitalists’. Google, for instance, is a marvel of the modern world, and the range of services it offers everybody with access to the internet is genuinely wonderful. I do my web surfing ...”

“... an undergraduate at Columbia, where Mark Van Doren was his teacher and mentor; and Robert Penn Warren was the editor (at Southern Review) whom he first sought to impress. But if the New Critical aesthetic disciplined Berryman it also inhibited him. It gave him a good technical training, but its insistence on what he later called ‘Eliot’s amusing theory ...”

“... displays in neon-lit cabinets, voice-responsive computers and the like, and installed them in a warren of renovated arches under a railway bridge by Central Station. Workers’ City reserved particular scorn for this place (which proved in the end to be a financial fiasco) and saw it only as an attempt by the Labour-run council to paint out Glasgow’s less ...”

“... the Kennedy assassination in Libra. Libra showed what could novelistically be done with the Warren Commission Report, after 24 years of cultural reflection. That book helps one see what DeLillo knows better than to undertake with Hammad, barely three years after publication of the US government’s 9/11 Commission Report. He is up to something more ...”

“... the servants’ apartments in Buckingham Towers B Block. It is, as he describes it, part of a ‘warren of interconnected rooms where all the drivers, cooks, sweepers, maids and chefs of the apartment block can rest, sleep and wait’. Balram’s master and mistress, Mr Ashok and Pinky Madam, the son and daughter-in-law of his feudal Dhanbad employer, live ...”

“... of the seemingly unshakeable bipartisan commitment to US global hegemony has been produced by young US-based thinkers on the left, unshackled from Cold War groupthink: Asli Bâli, Aziz Rana, Jeanne Morefield, Nicholas Mulder, Christy Thornton, Daniel Bessner, Stephen Wertheim, Samuel Moyn et al. Their views share a sense of the incapacity of US force to ...”

“... Liberal Hollywood can be equally blinkered: not a single Mexican face shows up in Bulworth, Warren Beatty’s fantasy about LA’s disenfranchised underworld. The residential map has become so segregated that few whites are aware of the bustling re-creation of Mexican life in areas like San Francisco’s Mission District. To go unseen is intrinsic to ...”

“... as his writing. When I reached the area near Columbia University, I remembered that as a student young Kerouac had looked out of his Livingston Hall dormitory straight at a frieze on the side of the (then) new Columbia library. It said ‘Goethe ... Voltaire ... Shakespeare ... Molière ... Dante ...’ And sure enough, just as you’d feared, Jean-Louis ...”

“... it is often forgotten, by Adam Smith too, on the greed and duplicity of the nabobs in general, and Warren Hastings in particular. As a young man, Lytton Strachey admired Hastings and wrote a long thesis on him, while dismissing Burke as ‘an ignorant enthusiast’. What strikes me on rereading those great philippics is, on ...”

“... to straighten it out: it represents the consciously exercised preference of a lifetime. One of his young favourites, Harry Stafford, who was 18 when he and Whitman began to share a close attachment and, whenever opportunity offered, the same bed, reported to Traubel years later that when Whitman stayed at the Stafford home, ‘he would make a great mess of his ...”