“... from a village in Northants in 1683 ‘to enjoy the exercise of religion with freedom’, but his brand of Calvinism was about all he found to enjoy when he got there. Benjamin was the fifteenth of Josiah’s seventeen children by two wives. At the age of ten he was taken out of school to help his father scratch a living as a soap boiler. Thereafter, he was ...”

“... literary opinions are just as forcefully expressed. There is a long list of enthusiasms: for William Howells and Ulysses S. Grant, for Logan Pearsall Smith, Frederick Prokosch, Edith Wharton, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Love Peacock and Henry Miller: ‘If he often sounded like the village idiot, that was because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the ...”

“... states of mind might dwell within the same body. The result of this approach is a rich and unusual brand of intellectual history: more interested in the typical and representative second-rate figure than the transcendent philosopher out of sympathy with his time; strong on individual minds but sceptical of free-floating ideas. But there are difficulties with ...”

“... at the wizened proprietor of the filling-station, who wore a long-peaked cap with the name of a brand of oil stitched on it, and who agreed, though without much vehemence, to everything his customer said. It was extraordinary how threatened the Texan appeared to feel by that procession on the road below: but one just had to look at the flushed face under ...”

“... celebrated Murakami’s ‘bold willingness to go straight over-the-top’, but Wonderland’s brand of Science Fiction owes more to the winning cartoonism of Kurt Vonnegut (touched perhaps by Raymond Roussel’s delight in deliriously over-elaborate explanations) than to the dirty cyberpunk realism of Sterling and ...”

“... After working​ on his film adaptation of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg apotheosised both the writer and himself by claiming his screenwriting and Burroughs’s literary style had synergised. Cronenberg apparently mused that were Burroughs to die he might write his next novel. Burroughs expired in 1997, and although Cronenberg has directed many films since then – operas too – while dabbling in graphic novels and other writings, Consumed is his first full-length work of fiction ...”

“... years, he was more than a literary celebrity: he was an international guru, dispensing his own brand of scientific optimism and preaching the need for a world government. He could command long personal audiences with American presidents and Soviet dictators alike. It couldn’t last and it didn’t. His reputation, already on a downward curve, dipped ...”

“... and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster ...”

“... altogether looking like a working man. In the brief all-comprehensive glance he gave his caller, William P. Miller will write in the Tribune, Chief Shippy took in a cruel, straight mouth with thick lips and a pair of gray eyes that were at the same time cold and fierce. The living moment tumbles haplessly into newsprint. The framed immigrant’s Jewish kin ...”

“... and renewal in postwar Toronto. Such criticism represented everything that the briskly rationalist William Empson, who detested religiose aesthetics like those of Eliot, found most nauseating. It was enamoured of charts and diagrams, polarities and sub-divisions, with that odd combination of rigorous categories and occult contents which one associates with ...”

“... nine hundred pages out of them. (For his mere 336 pages Best casts much wider.) John Morley and William Harcourt, whom Jenkins toyed with doing before deciding on the big ‘un, would have required far more research. There is also clearly a market for Churchilliana, not only in Britain but in the US (for which Jenkins’s glossary of British Parliamentary ...”

“... as his suburb.’ He was right – but only partly right, there are no absolutes here. What he and William Morris, George Gissing, Ebenezer Howard and a sprawl of anti-urbanists didn’t foresee was a time when that choice would, inconceivably, be in favour of the centripetal. Of course, in a faute de mieux-ish way, the city was always an unwanted lure, a ...”

“... the male dons going to such trouble.Beyond these celebrity lectures, she cultivated a distinctive brand of quirky and memorable outspokenness. Reminiscences is full of anecdotes which illustrate exactly that. While still a student, for example, she stood up to William Gladstone when he came to Cambridge to visit his student ...”

“... never misses an opportunity for attack,’ John Gawsworth, an admiring contemporary, observed. William Rothenstein thought him ‘armed and armoured, like a tank, ready to cross any country, however rough and hostile’. He certainly had a genius for pugnacity, no doubt partly encouraged by the example Hulme set: ‘a very rude and truculent man’ in ...”

“... Sidney’s mentor Hubert Languet and to his most powerful Continental champions, John Casimir and William of Orange. The years which followed produced disappointment and frustration. Sidney and Greville found their progress at court, and their plans for military service in Europe and exploration in the New World, blocked by a queen who could not be won to the ...”