“... historian, and he succeeded only too well. Clear, factual and plain, his virtues have been read back into his originals, primarily Ptolemy and Aristobulus, as if Arrian alone had been able to see the solid gold in the gilded corpus of Alexander histories which the glittery taste of the Hellenistic age had allowed to be neglected. Not ...”

“... Russians knew the name Sheila – which had an easy diminutive, Shaylochka – because they had read C.P. Snow.) It was impossible to live in the Soviet Union as a foreigner and not become obsessed with spying. (If anyone doubts this, read Michael Frayn’s wonderful novel The Russian Interpreter, published the year I ...”

“... New York. In a 1983 interview, he remarked: ‘I live with this paradox. I am an important poet, read by younger writers, and on the other hand, nobody understands me.’ It doesn’t seem possible that this surprises the artist; the junction and balance of the two propositions is surely of the essence. The importance and the influence are the ...”

“... and, in consequence, I felt radically diminished. It was only several years later that I came to read The Case of George Dedlow, an imaginary case-history of a physician who had suffered amputations of all his limbs, written by Weir Mitchell, that superb neurologist (and novelist), who had been the first to describe not only ‘phantom limbs’ but also the ...”

“... which attacked the dominance of economic calculation in contemporary society; he even read a good deal of T.H. Green. No less crucial was his employment from 1936 as a tutor for the Workers’ Educational Association, conducting classes in South-East England. In the early decades of the WEA there was a marked demand for courses in British social ...”

“... same height and weight as Byrne in order to maintain verisimilitude’.In his 1959 biography, Richard Ellmann reported that Joyce ‘often agreed with Vico that “imagination is nothing but the working over of what is remembered.”’ Ellmann also quotes Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen: ‘Imagination is memory.’ Budgen, whom Joyce met in Zurich in ...”

“... Duchamp, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Albert and Juliette Gleizes, Henri Lefebvre and, later, Richard Wright. They bought paintings (Renoir, Picasso, Degas); travelled to Egypt and the Caribbean; in New York they knew Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, Alfred Kazin, John Cheever, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, Eleanor Clark.When Hazzard met ...”

“... In fact she identified with her: ‘She’s been hurt. She knows the score … I don’t read the gossip stuff. That’s what comes out of her movies. She’s someone who was abused. I could identify with her. I never could identify with any other white movie star. They were always white people doing white things.’ (White people doing white things ...”

“... no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate agent Roy Brooks that my brother read aloud (‘The décor is revolting … rain drips sadly onto the oilcloth … sacrifice £3500’). As Jeremy Lewis observes, it was a remarkably handsome newspaper, much more spacious in its page layouts and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its ...”

“... of Vietnam Syndrome. His ‘theory of the Cold War’ was ‘We win, they lose,’ as he told Richard Allen, who became his first national security adviser. Allen liked the idea but knew it would be heresy to a foreign policy establishment that believed in peaceful co-existence. Yet times had changed: what was a reactionary fringe position in 1964 ...”

“... me to Marxism than in repelling me from it. I was – I admit it – impressed. And now I read, in Ignatieff’s book, that it was an annihilatingly hostile letter from Berlin to the Vice-Chancellor of Sussex University which ‘put paid to Deutscher’s chances’. The fox is crafty, we know, and the hedgehog is a spiky customer, and Ignatieff ...”

“... Melville had been Grumbach’s literary god, alongside Poe and Jack London, ever since he’d read Pierre, or The Ambiguities as a teenager. He ‘made the war’ with his new name, and by the time it was over so many people knew him as Melville that there was no question of going back to Grumbach. Even Melville found himself getting confused: ‘I forget ...”

“... in 1907 converted to Lutheranism; he doesn’t seem to have taken his baptism very seriously. Well-read in contemporary Hungarian and Western literature and immensely ambitious to contribute to literary and cultural history in the footsteps of Wilhelm Dilthey, the young man was active in a circle around Endre Ady, the greatest Hungarian poet of the ...”

“... actually did. There are, of course, other books with pictures of his work; and this book is best read with at least one of those at hand. Rawsthorn’s emphasis on realms other than the visual is certainly right for this complex story. It’s mildly annoying, however, when her fashion summations are too pat and moralistic, and it’s a little more so when ...”

“... of the non-combatant Lawrence to complain while thousands of his compatriots fell in France. But Richard Aldington felt that Lawrence never recovered from the banning of The Rainbow, and Kinkead-Weekes follows him by placing this event at the centre of his narrative. The judge ruled that there was ‘no justification whatever for the perpetration of such a ...”