“... of Netflix, Amazon and YouTube, there are 700 agents at CAA, but the story told in James Andrew Miller’s riveting book is really about the personalities who invented the game. It is, more particularly, the story of what Michael Ovitz gave to the world and what that world took away from him. It’s Citizen Kane to a disco beat with the moral ...”

“... was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next husband, Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent ...”

“... was more practical: he included useful remarks about sites and materials, and suggested his own St James Piccadilly as a good, economical model. But the two architects agreed on many things, in particular that the new churches should stand free and not be crammed into the tight, built-up corners many City churches occupy.On the whole the Commissioners followed ...”

“... provinces to the home-ruling and ungarrisoned status they had enjoyed under Charles V and to grant them some measure of religious toleration’. But Philip regarded Elizabeth’s support for the Dutch as a war-like act and his direct response was to launch the Armada. England’s naval victory in 1588 was followed in the same year by a successful defence ...”

“... In one of literary history’s great instances of the pot calling the kettle black, Henry James complained of ‘the absence of spontaneity, the excess of reflection’ in George Eliot’s work. To other readers, of course, the proportion that Eliot – or even late James – sets up between narrative spontaneity (or action and event), on the one hand, and reflection or disquisition, on the other, seems harmonious and attractive, and it’s certainly easy enough to think of novels suffering from the opposite problem of lots of action and little thought ...”

“... semi-ingenuously. He teases Sagar from time to time too. ‘I’m puzzled by the reference to Cary Grant,’ Sagar writes, about a portrait from the poem ‘Sacrifice’ (‘The welts of his brow deepened, fold upon fold./Like the tragic mask./Cary Grant was his living double’): ‘He doesn’t seem to me to have a ...”

“... sparing herself no end of eventual aggravation.Into this vacancy the editor and biographer James Atlas tentatively ventured. He had made his name with a Life of Delmore Schwartz in 1977 and had matured into a venerable if fidgety fixture in New York publishing. He and Roth had been friendly for decades. Early in their relationship, which began in ...”

“... only republish. Professor Tucker thanks the University of Massachusetts for a Faculty Development Grant and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for its support from 1975 to 1977. A lot of travel and research went into the book, which shows the benefits: a simple thesis, that Monet edited the landscape to make it seem more rural, has been backed up with a wealth of ...”

“... and might I presume on the leniency and compassion (this word underlined) of the assessors to grant me another six months to get my taxes in order? This was read out in a flat, bored voice so that, if one closed one’s eyes, one would swear that the reader – a terribly thin man – was simultaneously doing something else. I kept my eyes down, and ...”

“... that seamlessly combined white power fanaticism with anti-communism. In 1977, Beam received a grant from the state of Texas to build a simulated Vietnamese rice paddy in swampland near Houston: here, he trained recruits as young as 13 to kill an imaginary enemy. Four years later a promising opportunity presented itself. A number of South Vietnamese ...”

“... it would be possible to encompass the perspectives of a humane reason and at the same time grant the religious intensity of the violence its deplorable authenticity and complexity’. These words must have been arrived at with some anguish, and much care. It is not easy, perhaps not even possible, to speak of ‘deplorable authenticity’ without ...”

“... follows. Ladies of easy virtue endangered men of virtue. The revolutionary solution: not to grant women overt political equality, but to exclude them from public life altogether. Politics was for men: for women – home and hearth. Such an ideology was internalised (to a degree) by the daughters of the Revolution itself, as Outram shows in exploring Mme ...”

“... was laid down by Cortés’s captain Diego de Ordaz in 1530. Offered the perfectly good grant of present-day Paraguay, he chose instead to explore between the Amazon and the Orinoco in the belief that gold ‘grew’ better near the equator – thanks to its natural affinity with the sun, and as God’s thoughtful dowry to a region otherwise so ...”

“... that is both affectionate and scornful, runs like an underground current through his work. Henry James and Lenny Bruce are often taken to be Roth’s improbably paired patron saints, but it is possible to add Eleanor Roosevelt to the gallery – or at least Henry Wallace and Paul Robeson, whose names are murmured half-reverentially throughout Roth’s ...”

“... could arouse formidable resentments. It should, by now, be no matter for surprise that under James, the mechanism of supposedly ‘Puritan’ discipline was frequently carried out through the official machinery of the Church courts, nor that under Charles, this was increasingly rarely the case. That we have in these issues one of the sources of the ...”