“... Keith and Mick. Like brothers. Like evil sisters in disguise. A two-headed beast. The opposite of Paul and John. The dark and the light. I’ve always been pulled toward darkness. Toward black. Toward death. Toward the South. Good. Now I’m heading the right direction. Away from the quaint North. Away from lobsters and white churches and Civil War graveyards ...”

“... who coined the phrase ‘romantic irony’ for the artistic apprehension of human duality; John Paul Richter, who invented the term ‘doppelgänger’; Schlegel, for whom, as for Coleridge, Shakespeare was a Proteus, and who wrote that dualism ‘is rooted so deeply in our consciousness that even when we are, or at least think ourselves, alone, we still ...”

“... else do you get a name like that?’ To us cocky British snobs who call the great man ‘Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ and don’t much mind what he called himself, the ‘mistake’ of the tourists is not tragical. But, for William Gaddis, this sort of ignorance leads up to the climax of The Recognitions, where his most admirable character – Stanley, the ...”

“... old film when Zhivago’s heart is described as ‘paper thin’. He thinks he sees Lara turning a corner in Moscow. He struggles to get off the bus, loosens his tie, finally makes it to the sidewalk where, after two steps, he drops dead. Dead chasing love, the thing we would die for. That was my father – stepping not off a bus but out of a shower in his ...”

“... one moves in a cocoon of incandescent heat. You could just about imagine a story in the manner of Paul Bowles unfolding here – where an intrepid European manuscript scholar, say, is snatched by Touaregs and spends the rest of a miserable life, sun-blistered and crazed, on the fringes of the desert, never to be seen by Westerners again. But it takes a lot ...”

“... tell you the Americans are going to betray us again just as they did in 1975 and 1991,’ he said. Paul Bremer, the chief US civilian administrator who heads the Coalition Provisional Authority, has been claiming, somewhat ludicrously, that life in Baghdad is back to normal. An energetic and arrogant man, who wears a smart New York suit with army boots ...”

“... but then he’ll snatch it and run off, like a stray cat tossed a scrap which then skulks in a corner to eat it. ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’ goes on to expose something intrinsically disquieting about dolls: the deathly antithesis to life and consciousness that they embody. Baudelaire describes how he once saw a boy who was ‘beau et frais’, primped and ...”

“... perpetually without air, the lid being down, so to speak, a 1912 fragrance sifting to the left corner where we read ‘La Merveille’ and escape. (‘Roses’) Guest died in 2006, and this Collected Poems amasses work from more than 20 books. She also wrote art and poetry criticism, a novel and a biography of the Imagist poet H.D. She became known as a ...”

“... of Joan Henry, an ex-debutante who had been caught passing a forged cheque. Muriel Box’s Street Corner was about women in the police force. The film to which she was most personally committed, however, was The Truth about Women, a feminist comedy inspired by A Room of One’s Own. Woolf, whose influence hangs over several of these lives, argued that privacy ...”

“... and David Garrick set off together to conquer London from Lichfield, or that Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne were once classmates in Aix, but it’s not clear that such coincidences demand joint biographies, let alone overarching hypotheses.Snyder is proper in her scholarship. She is at pains to point out that although only a few blocks separated the homes ...”

“... doesn’t). She loved jazz, but resigned from the Gargoyle Club when she wasn’t allowed in with Paul Robeson. She crossed the Khyber Pass, then closed to women, disguised as a man; became ‘wildly socialistic and revolutionary’ in Paris; campaigned with H.G. Wells against the teaching of patriotic history. One of her students at the LSE testified: ‘At ...”

“... the GSA, then housed in rooms above the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street, just round the corner from the current site. Such conventional origins do little to account for the astonishing originality of Mackintosh’s work, its arcane symbolism and outlandish forms, which, combined with a brilliant mastery of functional, three-dimensional space, were ...”

“... imperialist, keener on plundering Spanish bullion ships than on paying for soldiers to carve out a corner of a foreign field three thousand miles away in Chesapeake Bay. James I, king during the Jamestown experiment (the plantation was named in his honour), was similarly minded to give his blessing to overseas projects only if they didn’t cost him ...”

“... was heating up. By contrast, the news on population has been slow to filter through. In 1968, Paul and Anne Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which became an international bestseller and made Paul Ehrlich a fixture on the chat show circuit (he appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson more than twenty ...”

“... a ‘historic opportunity’ – that is the phrase that keeps recurring – to break out of their corner and restore relations with the United States. Women and young people, with their vigils for the American dead, express both an ardent sympathy for a loss they comprehend and an intense frustration with the stale taboos of a superannuated revolutionary ...”