“... of élitism and philistinism. The fact that the PEN/Faulkner awards panel included the novelist Charles Johnson, Guterson’s writing instructor – who also provided a puff for the book – did not seem to arouse any concern, but then the chances of finding a judge from the writing-seminar circuit who had no connection with Guterson were quite slim. Set in ...”

“... women writers (Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton), African-Americans (Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar) and immigrants (Abraham Cahan). He also introduced US readers to foreign literature. British literature was already widely read in the cheap reprints that proliferated before the passage of an international copyright ...”

“... As a result ‘going postal’ came to be used as a synonym for a berserk outburst of violence. Charles Bukowski’s butch, squalid autobiographical novel Post Office (1971) gives some idea of how this might have come about: ‘It was 12 hours a night, plus supervisors, plus clerks, plus the fact that you could hardly breathe in that pack of flesh, plus ...”

“... It sounds a bit too much like a fairy tale, just the area Rowling is leaving behind with her frank descriptions of drug-taking and grotty sex. Perhaps that’s why she adds in a fourth use of the cyber-curse, to break the pattern, though this last one is slightly different and the rule-of-three seems to persist. A character who pops up for just long ...”

“... book, which focuses on the politics of public taste in a modern democracy. In Bennett’s play Sir Charles Worgan, a press baron, becomes the patron of a progressive theatre-manager, Holt St John. (Worgan also rather superbly patronises Oxford University, and receives an honorary doctorate for his efforts.) But Worgan soon falls out with St John, since he ...”

“... furious at a review by Vidal in the New York Review of Books that linked him and Henry Miller to Charles Manson (‘The Miller-Mailer-Manson man, or M3 for short, has been conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons; at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed’), decided to take his gripe to the source. It was evident that there would ...”

“... and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our feet, speaking of Hart Crane and the last words we would have in our mouths at that moment of surrender.’ His idol was Billie Holiday, who gives the name to one of his best short ...”

“... new sounds was a passion he shared with other composers in the American maverick tradition, from Charles Ives, Cage and Morton Feldman to Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix and Sun Ra.The revolution that began at the Five Spot was part of the wider black freedom struggle, as well as an extension of an American philosophy of self-reliance and artistic emancipation ...”

“... like the Yellow Book, the Chameleon and the Savoy took inspiration from William Morris, Charles Ricketts and other luminaries of the Arts and Crafts movement, favouring medieval typefaces, elaborate woodcut illustrations, uncut pages and plenty of white space. An equivalent international vogue for ‘ephemeral bibelots’ was inspired by the ...”

“... his books in preparation for their move to a sumptuous new building, constructed by the architect Charles McKim, on 36th Street and Madison Avenue. Within a few years, Greene was all but in charge, not only of the library but of all Morgan’s acquisitions for it. ‘Miss Belle Greene can spend more money in an afternoon than any other young woman of ...”

“... of his time. In a postscript the judge recommends the Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Question 1 is: ‘If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, would you have written such a story?’ Question 6 is: ‘What set of aesthetic values makes you think that the cheap is more valid than the noble and the slimy is more truthful than ...”

“... of the United States of America’ – does he repeat himself? Very well, he repeats himself.As Frank Kermode once said, literary canons ‘negate the distinction between knowledge and opinion’. They make beliefs about what we should know into what we do actually know. That is why they are both necessary and dangerous. They are necessary because you ...”

“... is likely to tell the whole story. Hence Gillray’s serial return to certain characters – Charles Fox, Napoleon, George III, the Prince of Wales, Burke, Sheridan and Pitt. The motive, the posture, the degree of deplorable wheedling would shift even as the character stayed the same.An earlier biographer, Draper Hill, judged that Gillray had ‘lifted ...”

“... problem’ to one of technical implementation. We learn as much from that peerless technocrat Hans Frank, in an article on ‘Technik des Staates’ in the 1941 volume of Zeitschrift der Akademie für Deutsches Recht – an organ whose very name, in context, offers a deathless essay in the sardonic. The tie that binds SS Russian Front vets with the likes of ...”

“... Unlike Viv Albertine, the former Slits guitarist and the author, so far, of two marvellously frank memoirs, she’s not an especially wild or gifted raconteuse. She hit the big time in the 1970s and has never been remotely precious about her stories, which means she’s told most of them loads of times already, most notably in Lester Bangs’s Blondie ...”