“... the televangelists confirmed every prejudice about American society. That such men should be allowed, not only to appear on television, but to run for the Presidency of the United States, is taken as proof of the immaturity of the nation’s social institutions and the inherent gullibility of its people. Whatever the weaknesses of European ...”

“... calmly became New Orleans, and Nieuw Zeeland New Zealand. Just how odd this practice was can be seen from the fact that although Arabs settled, and sometimes set up statelets, all round the perimeter of the Indian Ocean, and speakers of various Chinese dialects spread all over South-East Asia during the same period (say, 1500-1800), we find no traces of ...”

“... Authors can be terrible liars, and never more so than when they are in the autobiographical vein. Like salesmen, they are at their most dangerous when most sincere. Roth’s publishers trumpet The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography as the facts, a novelist’s autobiography – ‘Roth and his battles, defictionalised and unadorned ...”

“... proof stage, presumably under duress. Earlier attempts to write about Plath were either soured by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is ...”

“... with his new book Manila Envelope. To acquire the book, you must write to Manila, and it will be posted to you in a manila envelope stamped ‘Contents: Poetry’; the manifesto itself is printed on manila paper. This visual and verbal punning puts me in mind of Frank O’Connor’s account of a picture he saw in Joyce’s Paris flat: the city of Cork in ...”

“... and change was likely to flower, though such a consciousness has often been kindled or stimulated by experience of collective calamity. Jews had a good share of afflictions, but these might be far apart in time and space. Jews in Spain were flourishing when others were driven out of England or France; in Poland when they ...”

“... supposed to work the trick. A long time ago, this media ritual passed the point at which it could be called self-satirising, and became instead a ludicrous and embarrassing chore. The reading and viewing and listening public would not notice if this non-event went uncovered, and the media would be glad to ...”

“... over the Caddo County Jail in Oklahoma in 1906, Thompson, like many good American boys, grew up to be a lot like his father. ‘Big Jim’ Thompson Sr was the popular multi-term sheriff of Caddo County until Oklahoma declared statehood at the turn of the century, and federal auditors began uncovering serious discrepancies in Big Jim’s books. A warrant for ...”

“... in order to oversee the hanging of the other man at dawn. The prisoner, Daniel Carney, guarded by the three troopers who captured him, is an escaped convict turned bushranger, the last man of the legendary Dolan gang whose other four members were gunned down nine days earlier. There has been no trial. In order to avoid any possible stirring of Irish anger ...”

“... after the commitment of American ground troops in 1965 and ended in the capture of the South by Communist forces in 1975. Yet this postcolonial history, and the degree of support enjoyed by the Vietnamese Communists, makes little sense unless one knows something about the earlier period, which is the subject of this ...”

“... causes of burps, rumbles, farts, sweats, swellings, flushes and rashes. We may even get a glance, by way of a nasty accident, at a bit of bone. But in other ways we know our insides hardly at all. We are vague about what they look like. Even when we have the words – spleen, kidney and so forth – the associated pictures are often schematic or gleaned from ...”

“... With regard to distributive justice, for instance – the questions of how goods should rightfully be distributed in society – some conceptions insist on our asking whether it is fair that some people should enjoy markedly more advantages than others. Those ideas dispute the ground, not just in the journals but in politics, with the presently more successful ...”

“... was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was. I spent long hours in the Church of San Salvatore in Venice, in the Louvre, in the Guggenheim Museum, coaxing a picture into life. I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-...”

“... it could. Born thus under sufferance, occupying a lowly level in the Signals hierarchy, run by an establishment-respectful general and composed of independent units – one for each occupied country except France, which had two, one for de Gaulle’s Free French and another for those loyal to Giraud – each recruiting and running its own partisans, SOE ...”

“... quotes in her introduction to this excellent biography, is one which apparently might still be asked by a Russian mother of a careless child. No British mother would say anything like it, if only because she could not think of a figure with comparable evocative power: writers here are hardly household names. She would ...”