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“... 20th-century attempts to frame the landscape, in the manner of Fox Talbot, Pitt Rivers or Edward Thomas, are viewed with suspicion. Their pastoral fantasies – expressed in photography, archaeology or poetry – become a mark of distance and loss. In the closing pages, Thorpe plays a postmodern trick, suddenly introducing a character called Adam Thorpe. He ...”

“... title, like Quicksands, might warn the reader not to expect too much by way of linear narrative or frank confession. Oblique, laconic, sometimes maddeningly discreet, Bedford’s memoir is infolded like a complicated puzzle. As it works itself out, shifting back and forth in time, a picture emerges of the world so often invoked in her fiction, the ...”

“... is coaxingly familiar. It didn’t matter to Keats that Chatterton’s spurious versifying priest, Thomas Rowley, was a fiction. What he admired was the result, a revivifying of English style with plum Anglo-Saxonisms. Motion needs us to believe in Dr Tabor’s historicity for the sake of the literary debate that is the novella’s point. But to make the ...”

“... of Oz: A Parable on Populism’ (1964), Henry Littlefield, a high-school teacher, interpreted L. Frank Baum’s novel as an extended metaphor for American politics in the 1890s. He argued that Baum, who in 1888 moved to the territory that became South Dakota, sympathised with the plight of the region’s farmers and was influenced by the views of a man he ...”

“... movements. In the late 1860s, his bank account shows regular payments to someone called ‘Miss Thomas’ – Nelly, it’s assumed. He made arrangements for her to accompany him on his last American trip. They fell through. His will left her £1000. Among the controversial facts is that Dickens and Ellen may have had one or more children, who died soon ...”

“... of the Corbett family, ‘who were murdered During the Massacre of the Christians in Delhi’; to Thomas Collins and no fewer than 23 members of his extended family, ‘all barbarously murdered at Delhi on or about the 11th of May 1857’; to Dr Chimmun Lall, a ‘native Christian and a Worshipper in this Church’, who ‘fell a martyr to his faith on the ...”

“... and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Wise, forger of rare editions. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the barrenness of American culture. Many of the angelheaded hipsters whom I met busied themselves in learning Old Church Slavonic or translating ...”

“... history books … but he is doing a good job.’ When Carter, along with many Democratic senators (Frank Church, George McGovern, Birch Bayh), lost out in that year’s elections, Biden found himself with increased seniority and free to tack further right.‘In a strange way,’ he said, ‘the election of Ronald Reagan is more consistent with the budgetary ...”

“... prevail.’ It is no easier to explain now. The power of Klemperer’s book in part comes from his frank inability to understand what unleashed the cataclysm. Nor does he seem to worry overmuch about this failure of theory. It is the fact of Nazism which engages him. He had been recording his life for years and soon realised that the record itself would be his ...”

“... domestic surveillance programme, determined that the man who had fallen from the window was Frank Olson, a chemist employed by the CIA. Hersh disclosed his findings to Olson’s family, who convened a press conference and announced that they would be suing the agency. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, was alerted to the danger by his ...”

“... Padgett once called them) is often vividly captured in I Remember: I remember the first time I met Frank O’Hara. He was walking down Second Avenue. It was a cool early spring evening but he was wearing only a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. And blue jeans. And moccasins. I remember that he seemed very sissy to me. Very ...”

“... also had something to do, on the other hand, with the two most terrifying and exciting images in Thomas Craven’s Treasury of Art Masterpieces: with Fouquet’s Agnès Sorel as the Virgin, where the sitter’s globular white breast thrusts it-self provocatively out at the viewer above a tightly-laced bodice; and with Grünewald’s green, twisted, lacerated ...”

“... Thomas Hardy once told Robert Graves how he had gone to the Oxford English Dictionary to confirm the existence of a dialect word he proposed to use in a poem, and came to a standstill because the only authority quoted for it was his own Under the Greenwood Tree. This is an acute case of our dependence on dictionaries, and illustrates the commonest reason for resorting to them ...”

“... skulduggery, scams and religions, ditto. Dirt-poor, barefoot, backwoods Florida (the subject of Frank Conroy’s memoir of the 1930s and 1940s, Stop-Time) is not all that long gone. Sweet tea, squirrel and grits Florida. Then, successively, railroads, oranges, real estate, wintering place, destination for domestic and foreign tourism, and retirement ...”

“... a day. He seems to have suffered from anxiety and depression throughout his life and was quite frank about it in public, explaining that mental illness was like any other kind of illness and that those who suffered from it shouldn’t be ostracised. He seems never to have suffered another major episode. The most fascinating sections of Guralnick’s book ...”