“... confess to ignorance about the mood of ordinary citizens in August 1914. Those who marched to war may also have had illusions, but these were soon brutally shattered. How did they cope, why did they continue, what did it all mean to them, what did it do to their patriotism, their religion, their views about authority, their politics and social or class ...”

“... by Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. Like Rybakov, Voinovich has been overtaken by events: whatever may be the end-result of the Gorbachovshchina, for the moment the progress towards a grey, featureless socialist future seems to have been halted, and what might have been a reasonable bet in the days of Brezhnev or Andropov now appears to be very much of a long ...”

“... proportionately, as in the European armies and I found myself remembering from The Last Enemy Richard Hillary’s friend Noel Agazarian, shot down in his Spitfire in 1940. The death in action of already well-known writers like Charles Péguy and Alain-Fournier seems like an accident: it is the younger ones who have the besoin de la fatalité, and are ...”

“... Ariès’s contribution to historical knowledge, however.) The other contemporary historian is Richard Cobb. For once, I am one up on him, for he rates only a single entry. Admittedly, it is a marvellous passage, his reflections on the suicides recorded in Box D4U17 in the Archives de la Seine, the dossiers of the morgue in the old Châtelet of Paris from ...”

“... in the light of the general argument advanced by Margot Heinemann in Puritanism and Theatre, it may be that we should also regard it as the quite natural response of a man less committed than Jonson to the royalist or ‘court’ party. Shakespeare had at least one patron (William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke) with substantial Puritan affiliations. He ...”

“... of a theory to be found readily enough, in several forms, as in Stevens, Empson, Blackmur, and Richard Poirier. Poirier’s A World Elsewhere is a typology of American literature consistent with the acceptance of Emerson as its prophet. Empson didn’t write a theory of American literature, but he thought James’s later style distinctively American in ...”

“... constrain the individual: history, imperial grandeur, Classicism, high culture – even villages. (Richard Hofstadter once explained how the ceaseless lure of land inhibited the growth of village settlements and led to the habit of continually pulling up stakes.) Repeatedly, in diaries, journals, letters, ‘official’ histories, promotional tracts and works ...”

“... who, according to a tradition Hughes doesn’t mention, ‘died a papist’ – the insight may not be original but it needs restating forcibly in a culture where Shakespeare is so often treated as a piece of Anglican heritage or as a second-rate Tory dramatist. It’s an applied insight which gains authority not just from the active excitement of ...”

“... family, as in: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ (Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky). The implied proposition is that happy families are not much use to a novelist, and the next sentence confirms this view. ‘All was confusion in the Oblonskys’ house.’ Very promising. Throughout his life Vladimir Nabokov ...”

“... political reform. In ‘a bright day, of which we already behold the dawn,’ he announced, ‘we may look forward with confidence to a state of society in which the different orders and classes of men will contribute more effectively to the support of each other than they have hitherto done.’ The essential structure of society, however, would remain ...”

“... of a guillotine blade terminates any simple-minded reveries. The constant flow of objurgation may have functioned as a relief from the mental pressure of it all, but if so, the reprieve was temporary. In December 1966 he hit rock bottom. He was ‘extraordinarily depressed’, unable to get up in the morning, condemned by his ‘outsider’ status to ...”

“... should take them at face value.’ The de rigueur response to such a claim is provided by Richard Poirier: ‘Fred’s created a character named Frederick Seidel that has little to do with who he is.’ In a review of The Cosmos Poems, Calvin Bedient obligingly clears his throat before contending with the unpleasant poetry: ‘However fictive and ...”

“... remembers the young and handsome John F. Kennedy’s triumph in televised debates with his rival Richard Nixon. According to legend, Nixon lost the 1960 election by his refusal to put on makeup before the broadcast. One of the more subtly interesting moments in Mad Men occurs when we see an actual Kennedy TV spot, pulled from the archives, screened in the ...”

“... a risk here, since the working-class lad educated beyond his station was a cliché even before Richard Hoggart gave him his long sociological life, and there are many ways of being estranged from your parents that do not involve learning Greek and Latin and reading books they can’t manage. Ask the middle classes. Harrison seems to be blaming his father ...”

“... and true – inside the coach had led him to open up with me, with such awkward results. Like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I believe that there are certain statements and positions you just can’t agree with. Unlike them, though, I have a pathological inability to take extreme opinions or actions, including religious ones, at face value. I ...”