“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... while a chapter on Elizabeth Anscombe does not get beyond superficialities. The ‘too little read’ Maurice Baring will remain so. If McDonagh had broadened her gaze from the tormented lodestars of the Catholic literary revival and included more of the (sometimes justifiably) obscure women writers than she does, the convert’s lot would look more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... commentators. Amid the clamour for retribution, Zakaria sounded calm and judicious. Read now, however, his article seems notable mostly for its evasions: he was careful not to say anything that might get him stigmatised as a radical. Blaming the Arabs for their failure to modernise, he didn’t mention the American obsession with energy ...”

“... The Family Idiot, and of Beauvoir’s America Day by Day; Lydia Davis, a translator of Proust; or Richard Sieburth, translator of Leiris, Michaux and Nerval. Instead, the publishers chose Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, two Americans who have lived in Paris since the 1960s and worked as English teachers at the Institut d’Etudes ...”