“... isn’t like Rochester. If Rochester in the ‘Allusion’, and Shadwell in The Medal of John Bayes (1682), accused Dryden of clumsy attempts to ape the rakish idiom, some of the written specimens weren’t in the least clumsy. This couldn’t be said of the play’s dedication to Rochester, however – a document of such laboured oiliness and such ...”

“... think of, and in content embraced pretty much everything from the jazz and stockings and Johnnie Walker of Autumn Journal (1939) to the budgies and television monitors of The Burning Perch (1963). He believed that poetry was a flexible instrument; it could be reportage or narrative, philosophical or symbolist, parabolic or oneiric. If the poems show that he ...”

“... state in waiting, ‘indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself’, as John Quincy Adams described it in 1823. In imitation of British freelance imperialists such as James Brooke, the ‘white rajah’ who ruled the state of Sarawak on Borneo as a private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of ...”

“... devotees to complain that Americans have got him all wrong. As early as 1897, the radical John Jay Chapman presented him as a fellow iconoclast who had been miscast as an apologist for American selfishness, ‘embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved’. The tendency of biographers to make their own Emersons means that some academics dislike the ...”

“... by the much decorated Audie Murphy. Oswald fixed his time and period just as the bank robber John Dillinger confirmed both the status of the FBI and the date, 22 July 1934, by getting himself shot to pieces emerging from the Biograph in Chicago, after watching Clark Gable play an amiable gangster in Manhattan Melodrama. While trying to ignore my ...”

“... Eysenck and Sargent echo these sentiments: they discuss in detail the ideas of the physicist E. H. Walker about an equivalent of quantum theory for the mind. It is heartwarming to see Eysenck return to his old ground of physics itself. What lies behind all these explanations, however, is a social rather than a logical strategy. The social strategy is to raise ...”

“... in this lunch.) They then questioned, too, Goldsmith’s suitability to be chairman of Slater Walker, and a week later wrote of an ‘intriguing connection’ between Eric Levine, Goldsmith’s lawyer, and T. Dan Smith. ‘At no time during this period,’ writes Ingrams – or is it his libel lawyer? – ‘was I conscious that we were doing anything ...”

“... analogous to Neorealism: Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, a text on sharecropper life accompanied by Walker Evans’s images, and In the Street, a spare, poetic documentary about Spanish Harlem, filmed by Helen Levitt.) Life magazine ran a seven-page spread on the movie’s ‘earthy verisimilitude’. Audiences accustomed to Hollywood coyness were amazed to see ...”

“... Prix of the fastest, whitest drugs available. He brushed aside compatriots/competitors like Elton John and called Mick Jagger the ‘sort of harmless bourgeois kind of evil one can accept with a shrug’. If pushed, this apprentice warlock could also recite Derek and Clive’s ‘The Worst Job I Ever Had’ by heart and generally came on like a twisted ...”

“... to practise my newly acquired skill. My parents were both readers and Dad took the periodical John Bull, the books they generally favoured literature of escape, tales of ordinary folk like themselves who had thrown it all up for a life of mild adventure, a smallholding on the Wolds, say, or an island sanctuary, with both of them fans of the naturalist ...”

“... too much of a digest: the notes to Chapter Two contain 27 consecutive references to two books by John Barron. Despite the enormous Soviet investment in technical intelligence, Richelson considers its importance smaller than in the United States, because of inferior Soviet technology and the much greater opportunities in the West for both humint operations ...”

“... Even those determined to assimilate – like the successful businessman who buys one of the shoes John Lennon was wearing the day he was murdered, and religiously slips it on every evening – are torn between Vietnamese and American customs. The stories skilfully trace the dilemmas and pains of immigrant experience, and they also constitute a wide-ranging ...”

“... and yet the climber is plainly exhilarated to be there. In 1919, Graves the walker found himself still sizing up the hills like a battlefield, unable to stop himself working out where to place the Lewis-guns for an assault on some lonely farm. But in the poem, ‘fear and shock’, or sudden death from the sky, mean ...”

“... back for a good long while. I don’t know that he’s still not over it. Fifty Septembers ago, John Steinbeck set out across America with his old standard poodle Charley as company. It was election season, as it was this September: Nixon-Kennedy. Steinbeck was 58, younger than the Maestro and myself, and near the end of his life. One can feel it in his ...”

“... be altered to follow not what actually happened, but what ought to have done. Surely (in Ragtime) John Pierpont Morgan might have invited Henry Ford to lunch to talk about reincarnation; and why wouldn’t the anarchist Emma Goldman have given a full-body massage to the society divorcée Evelyn Nesbit (accompanied by a lecture on sexual politics)? These lines ...”