“... I lack musical intelligence – for which I don’t even have genetics to blame. My older brother, Robert, is a successful pianist. Or, to quote my book Beethoven’s Kiss: Dr Train, the psychoanalyst my father had me see when [my brother] Steve killed himself, once told me, after having determined that my mother hadn’t caused my homosexuality, that the ...”

“... broadly right, even if it is far from the mainstream view among the Anglo-American commentariat. Robert Kagan, for example, remains bullishly confident of America’s supremacy in his new (and ruefully titled) book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams.* He believes that the US should assume ‘leadership of a united democratic bloc’ against the ...”

“... brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership. Hockney had found an exemplar, a kindred spirit and an alter ego through whom, you could say, he re-created himself. His Cavafy – the man’s bespectacled face, his world, his city, his life, his sound, his gestus – constituted a double translation of the poetry, into the portable art of etching via an English ...”

“... except as a version of what television has accustomed us to call ‘fictionalised documentary’. Robert Phelps was able to construct a perfectly coherent autobiography from Colette’s scattered reminiscences, and present The Earthly Paradise as if it were, not an imaginative parallel to her life, but the real thing. All Colette’s biographers, even ...”

“... causing turmoil; and for the author to turn on a chill by technique does not even pretend to alter the characters. The process of bargaining is often felt as a chill. Our sympathies have been so much aroused that any theory allowing the events of the day to do them some kind of good comes as a relief, in keeping with the book’s realistic good-humoured ...”

“... 1960s, the comic-book landscape was being altered by the ‘underground comix’ movement, led by Robert Crumb. Among Crumb’s most popular creations are the suave adventurer Fritz the Cat (whose conquests include a female ostrich and his own sister) and Mr Natural, a fountainhead of exasperatingly vague advice, outfitted in a Tolstoyan beard and ...”

“... equally inevitable.’ If their work seems to us now a record of their failure to understand or alter the conditions of their age, ‘we need to ask in what degree it is our failure rather than theirs.’ Kermode’s theme is the virtue of transgression – virtue in its double sense of merit and power. He begins with a forgotten Thirties novel that he ...”

“... direction, or, perhaps, on issues remote from the reading public’s own experience: they cannot alter strongly-held opinions formed in work-places, pubs, homes and in such places as the City. (The British pub is arguably more influential than the press in forming opinion on domestic policies.) Even the heavily-controlled press of Communist or other ...”

“... so without risk. The same is true of the Americans and the Communist system. But that does not alter the fact that neither side planned to attack the other. The basic perception which initiated the Cold War was, as Halle and his epigones used to point out, quite false. Gaddis does not answer one question which has always interested me. Was it the ...”

“... transport for the inspection teams – and it was never the intention that CIA intelligence should alter the course of the inspections themselves. Inspections in Iraq were initially supposed to operate in the same way, with Security Council resolutions and Iraqi declarations setting the parameters for on-site inspections. But incomplete data submissions and ...”

“... software, but for decades this enormous investment seemed to pay no dividends. As the economist Robert Solow put it in 1987, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Perhaps too much time was wasted in training employees to use computers; perhaps the sorts of activity that computers make more efficient, like word ...”

“... attention in individualised verse forms. Supernatural power, the ability to shapeshift, alter fates, change the weather, comes to be associated with the inventiveness of song, with rapidly metamorphosing rhymes (‘perish’, ‘cherish’, ‘vanquish’, ‘anguish’) and dancing, careless rhythms: ‘This wreck of a realm – this deed of my ...”

“... the best in the country, and education – including that offered at a nautical school run by Robert Burns’s friend David Sillar – was counted high. There was suddenly a book shop, Templeton’s in the High Street, and newspapers from London, along with the hot political and literary journals of the day. In a flash, Irvine became a town that was part ...”

“... This sort of anthology is just the right place to happen on Hardy’s ‘The Garden Seat’, Robert Frost’s marvellous little short tale in verse about the buzz saw, a sonnet of Dante admirably translated by Kenneth Koch, Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Giving Potatoes’, Theodore Roethke’s ‘The Meadow Mouse’ or a 12-line poem by James Stephens (author ...”