“... of merchants offering knicknacks. There were Sicilian villagers and Boston Irish, Filipinos, more Germans, Breton women in native dress, Spaniards, Brazilians, Québecois. Lucas is that familiar American male hero, a porous scout, always on the search for sensations and experiences, vaguely religious but also vaguely faithless, and uninterestingly ...”

“... are written – unless one happens to be Lord Chesterfield – because they have to be or because more or less involuntary occasion calls them forth. But these two were almost morbidly aware of what they were letting themselves in for. Hart-Davis’s first letter, on 23 October 1955, begins (with a characteristic cricketing metaphor): ‘This is not so much ...”

“... the following year, the Brussels Commission tried to curb the outlay on farm support and earmark more money for new industries and jobs. The Governments snubbed the plan: but they soon faced angry opposition. The European Parliament, once merely nominated, had now been elected by 111 million voters; and it fought back. Egged on by its adroit budget ...”

“... created Polish republic. Their commander was called Major Cedric E. Fauntleroy. What could be more surreal than that? In 1939 Babel was arrested by the secret police and his papers were confiscated. He died in prison the following year – there seems to be some doubt as to whether he was shot or succumbed to typhus. But the ruled cashbook in which he ...”

“... with a little fantasy’. He also says he believes that the old man’s fabled rudeness was no more than the nervous exasperation of an artist whose audience rarely understood what he was up to. Evelyn’s great fear was ‘incomprehension’: ‘It was this, more than anything else, which he dreaded, and which made him ...”

“... expansion and the high land costs they prompt have constrained fairly few American cities. Almost more striking is the doggedness of homegrown opposition to sprawl in the US, and the ease with which the tricks of its trade have been copied by other countries with different patterns of ideology, land supply and ownership. In part, it is the resounding success ...”

“... by defining one’s terms. But I wouldn’t have thought that anybody believes that story any more; indeed, lots of us learned not to believe it from Putnam. What a strange business philosophy is. Putnam’s discussion of representation and perception is, however, less abrupt. I’ll concentrate on that. Common sense observes that typical states of the ...”

“... know: the author may know things, and so may the reader, but people not knowing things is always more interesting than what they know. In a good novel facts will seem incidental. Tolstoy gives us a picture of life on the Napoleonic battlefield no history book can compete with, but this isn’t because of the information that War and Peace contains. Even ...”

“... in ‘East Coker’. Two years later the familiar compound ghost of ‘Little Gidding’ was even more downbeat: Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense Without enchantment, offering no promise But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit As body and soul begin to fly ...”

“... first thing to see to if you want to write well is to avoid doing bad writing, used thinking. The more positive requirements can be left till later, if only a little later. Clichés are infallible symptoms of used thinking. Martin Amis has always wanted to be a good writer and he has got what he wanted. He early acquired a habit of vigilance, of stopping ...”

“... the Bush team wouldn’t rush to give reconstruction contracts to France, Germany and Russia,’ Thomas Friedman grumbled in the New York Times, ‘but why shove that in their faces while we’re asking them to forgive Iraq’s debts?’ Or was the Wolfowitz directive a bargaining chip placed on the table as part of Baker’s negotiating strategy? Are the ...”

“... near the River Congo, with small brick houses set along avenues bordered by mango trees; it housed more than a thousand leprosy patients. There was no segregation of the ‘lepers’, a cruel and unnecessary measure meant to prevent the transmission of the disease. Leprosy is not particularly contagious, and out of some 100,000 patients at the time in the ...”

“... McCartney, the leader of the short-lived UK Unionist Party, which wanted a Northern Ireland more completely integrated with Great Britain, once complained that Paisley was a pseudo-unionist whose real aim was to make Ulster a ‘mini-Geneva, run by a fifth-rate Calvin’. Certainly, the DUP, founded in 1971, began as a postscript to an ecclesiastical ...”

“... times’ sake, we could just recite again some morsels from the Sun’s coverage of a war in which more than a thousand people died. It was the paper that celebrated the torpedoing of a ship carrying 1,200 men with the headline ‘GOTCHA.’ It was the paper that paid £5 (plus a can of non-Argentine corned beef) for every ‘anti-Argie’ joke sent in by ...”

“... premature. The last issue of transition appeared in 1938, five years after the Autobiography, and more than sixty years later it still means a great deal. Of all the little reviews which, as Stein loved to say, ‘died to make verse free’, transition is one of the very few to have made a permanent mark. It was founded and edited by Eugene Jolas (initially ...”