“... back, Spartacus, Moses and even Robin Hood were played by Americans, while Nero, Pharoah, King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham had British accents. To use an American for the hero was only natural, but the hiring of Britons to play a specifically political kind of villain says something particular: namely, that American mythology has quite sharply ...”

“... by his translation of the Austrian folk tale Bambi, which carried a moist Foreword from John Galsworthy.) This was the literary bridge that carried Chambers from relative hackdom on the Daily Worker to pre-eminence at the Stalinist flagship of letters, The New Masses. Indeed it was his usefulness and ability in this department that got him ...”

“... a rather inconclusive review of the literature on ‘white-collar crime’ by the late John Spencer, and an important critical essay by Paul Hirst on the inability of orthodox Marxism to theorise the joint-stock company. None of these interventions did much to ground their discussion in the developing realities of economic crime in Britain. This ...”

“... of Philip Glass’s Monsters of Grace, ‘a digital opera in three dimensions’ which has toured North America and Europe since it opened last year, says of this work: ‘I’m not giving you puzzles to solve, only pictures to hear.’ Some of the tales that Rée includes within his metaphysics remind us that Western sensibilities, however gross they may ...”

“... and tells me ideally she would vote for a bizarre dream-ticket of Bradley and Republican senator John McCain, who both advocate it. But most are straightforwardly undecided between Bradley and the other Democratic contender and favourite, Al Gore. Bradley arrives, six and a half feet tall and ramrod straight. He walks round the room, shaking hands and saying ...”

“... saved or lost.’ She was sure that the devil is present in creation. She and the novelist John Hawkes had a lot to say to each other about the devil in the course of their correspondence, although in The Habit of Being we get only O’Connor’s portion of this exchange. (The trouble with books like this one is that the reader feels as if he or she ...”

“... nickname of ‘Baldhead’. The Plunket Greenes had links with a very different world from that of North End Road, Hampstead. Mrs Plunket Greene was a niece of Baron Von Hugel, the theologian. A more obvious biographical and psychological puzzle is the effect on Waugh of his First wife’s desertion in the summer of 1929, while Waugh, who had left her in ...”

“... the tremendous pressures of poverty and exploitation in the South into the arena of the North’ – there could emerge a new and far-reaching agenda for reconstruction. Liberalism also was long occluded, but is now again, in name, triumphant. ‘Oblivion, transvaluation, mutation, redemption: each, according to their intuition, will make their own ...”

“... her childhood in Sylhet, Bangladesh, a retired schoolteacher, still lives with her older sister in North Calcutta in a small rented flat. My father’s ancestral house languishes in Bangladesh and is at last, we hear, to be torn down; but he has been luckier than most other ‘refugees’ – he rose to a high position in the company he worked for, and bought ...”

“... Watier’s, ‘stank’, he said, ‘of horse-dung and bad blacking’. Asked about a tour to the North, he enquired of his valet: ‘Which of the lakes do I admire?’ ‘Windermere, sir.’ ‘Ah yes – Windermere, so it is – Windermere.’ He was obsessed with cleanliness, spending two hours every morning on his ablutions, brushing his flesh with a ...”

“... almost to zero. There has never been a really successful modern recasting of Beowulf apart from John Gardner’s anarchic Grendel of 1971. (Michael Crichton’s disastrous and vainly Scandinavianising Eaters of the Dead has just been hauled back into print on the back of Jurassic Park.) The only Anglo-Saxon novels of any weight are about defeat and the end ...”

“... of a phone when Nora was 80 cost her the excitement of letters coming up the road with John Willie McGrath, the postman, on his bike, and the installation of a television when she was 85 meant that her friends gave up their twisting narrations in favour of Dallas reruns, so the introduction of modern toiletry removed from Moveen for ever the ...”

“... of the family was commandeered by the terrible young Saint-Just, commissioner to the armies of the North. Yourcenar admits: ‘Like a number of French men and women of my generation, I worshipped Saint-Just when I was very young.’ She had liked to fancy that her great-great-grandmother fell in love with the handsome revolutionary: later the author’s ...”

“... afford to move to the house where they lived for the rest of their lives, in idyllic La Jolla just north of San Diego. Marlowe remained in LA. The author who once said he ‘lived on the edge of nothing’ gave that existence to his protagonist, in whom were combined the drinker of Chandler’s successful, social Twenties and the itinerant, lonely, anonymous ...”

“... that the tracker had not been issued by the police but was the personal property of a GTTF cop, John Clewell, they contacted the FBI. It turned out that another officer in the unit lived next door to Anderson. What if the police had broken into Anderson’s flat? ‘I wasn’t even believing it as I was saying it,’ one of the drug detectives said. Leads ...”