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“... Students of the life and works of Walter Scott and James Hogg may have glimpsed the shadowy, not to say meteoric, not to say dubious presence of the publisher John Macrone, and learned of his prompt desire, after Scott’s death in September 1832, to write his Life, basing it to a large extent on rural informants ...”

“... and the great beauty of the ‘other book’ come partly from the dissonance of its elements. James Barrie noted in 1922 that ‘long after writing P. Pan its true meaning came back to me – desperate attempt to grow up but can’t.’ Le Grand Meaulnes is about adolescents who want to want not to grow up, but fail. Alain-Fournier, as has been pointed ...”

“... myth – one we can still half assent to while half persuaded by the black, reductive alternative. Frank Kermode, while studying the mythopoeic patterns of The Spire, is surely right about the importance for that novel of a particular place, Salisbury, and a particular trade: ‘I don’t know exactly where he got the facts about the mason’s ...”

“... the Russia Section of MI6. ‘No one else could have got that close to him.’ Her irritated boss, Frank, tells her to shut up, but Eve is incapable of shutting up, or of stopping herself, or not overstepping. She has noticed other killings, in other places, that seem unconnected except that in one way or another they appear to be the work of a woman. ...”

“... First/Bunny died, then John Latouche,/then Jackson Pollock,’ Frank O’Hara reflects during a post-prandial stroll around midtown Manhattan in ‘A Step away from Them’, written in August 1956. Everyone knew Jackson Pollock and the lyricist John Latouche, but only insiders to the avant-garde coteries in which O’Hara moved would have known who Bunny was – especially since she published under the name V ...”

“... biographies serves to emphasise what a serious lapse of knowledge that had been on my part. James Bartholomew’s, it is true, qualifies as an almost satirical study, but it would hardly have much point if its subject was not already an identifiable character in the international cast of the rich and the super-rich. The Sultan’s fortune, we are ...”

“... naturalistic theatre. The Revolutionary Road of the title is part of the housing estate to which Frank Wheeler, an ex-infantryman and former Greenwich Village drop-out, has moved with his family. Much of the action takes place in suburban living-rooms. ‘The whole idea of suburbia,’ says Frank – who is something of a ...”

“... and old experienced Europe. In 1919 Russell traced the pragmatism that Dewey shared with William James to ‘that instinctive belief in the omnipotence of Man and the creative power of his beliefs which is perhaps natural in a young, growing and prosperous country, where men’s problems have been simpler than in Europe and usually soluble by energy ...”

“... pages of a book. All his life he was desperately concerned about appearances. He fired the poet James Thomson from the paper he edited for drunkenness (‘The City of Dreadful Night’ first appeared in Bradlaugh’s National Reformer). And though he was more or less in love with his long-time collaborator Annie Besant (and she desperately so with ...”

“... Western and gangster films would become anthology classics and whose personal mystique resembled James Agee’s without the all-night jags. When Warshow asks Podhoretz out to lunch, ‘I felt as a girl with a secret infatuation must feel when the boy she’s been mooning over asks her for a date.’ It was a compact beehive of brain industry and Podhoretz ...”

“... Halsted Street where Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie lived; the Board of Trade building where Frank Norris’s novel The Pit is set; Studs Lonigan’s street corner on the South Side from James Farrell’s trilogy; the block of South Drexel where Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son killed and incinerated his ...”

“... in throughout Mackenzie’s writing career, many from unexpectedly distinguished sources. Henry James may well have been influenced by Mackenzie’s good looks. He had been so swept away by Rupert Brooke’s appearance that it had been quite a relief to be told he was not a very good poet. But about Mackenzie he was rhapsodic, considering him by far the ...”

“... at last to be seen in Britain, is a disconcerting venture into territory somewhere between Henry James, Jouhandeau and Hammer Films, I find it less of a disappointment than Truffaut’s far more orthodox trifle, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes. Are we nervous for Truffaut because he charms us? His first ‘big’ film (it in fact had a small budget, was in ...”

“... Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while working as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State, dunned the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million backhander to ...”

“... libertarian, Ayn Rand atheist – ‘a tiny contrapuntal campus movement’, in the words of James Mann in Rise of the Vulcans, whose members were as defiantly countercultural as hippies and peaceniks. Together, white Southern Democrats and self-confessed conservatives shaped the social agenda of conservative Republicanism. The aggressive certainties of ...”