“... American writing that have flourished and endured. Wolff sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David ...”

“... her fault, poor dear. Twenty years earlier she might have been trading poisoned darts with John Barrymore. But she and her sorority sisters were condemned to representing a girdled, uplifted world whose only edges were in the bones and stitching of their foundation garments. Faced with so much overwhelmingly off-putting evidence, the feminists, and ...”

“... when state funding started to dry up. Likewise, left-leaning community officers hired to foster civic engagement transmogrified into housing managers when faced with protests over rising damp rather than demands for art classes. This suggests that flexibility could be a snare as well as an asset, for as Ortolano puts it, ‘market liberalism ...”

“... service and the entrepreneurial culture of neoliberalism, and to the way this fed efforts to foster indigenous production, is illuminating. But affinity is not causation, and it isn’t clear just how much significance one can accord to the work of these charities in ‘making’ neoliberalism, or even in making some of the specific reforms ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue ...”

“... the bewildering complexity of the Iran-Contra affair, and got gates galore. Since Oliver North and John Poindexter had communicated their fell designs through a system called the Prof computer, and since the thing hinged so much on transfers of hot and dirty money, I myself proudly came up with ‘Profligate’ which, though it won me no prizes, did get ...”

“... annual stipend so he could concentrate on his poetry, only to commit suicide two years later; to John Quinn, a lawyer and collector to whom T.S. Eliot gave the manuscript of The Waste Land; to James Laughlin, founder and editor of New Directions (or Nude Erections as Pound liked to call it); to Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry; to Scofield Thayer and James ...”

“... This​ book is a departure from John Carey’s normal mode, much more intently introductory than anything else he has written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness and hospitalisation’) or indeed with other sorts of knowledge that might be thought fairly general (‘Totalitarian regimes seek to control every aspect of life, including writing ...”

“... Her report suggests that the diagnosis of abuse by a satanic cult makes it possible for carers and foster-parents to ‘care for very damaged children with patience and sympathy’. However, she says, the belief has also encouraged fears of an unknown evil among child protection workers ... and seems to generate an obsessional desire to find out what happened ...”

“... do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government ...”

“... understood payback. He dishes out the same kid-glove treatment to Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, even John Major, whom he was meant to despise because of the help the Tories had offered to Republicans trawling for smears during the 1992 election. ‘“I kind of like old John,” Clinton said, “but a lot of people ...”

“... lures the animal inside. In the library, as the bear dozes beside her, she picks up an edition of John Richardson’s Wacousta (1832), often called the first Canadian novel, and then reaches for the next book on the shelf: an 1858 memoir by Edward John Trelawny who ‘burned Shelley’s body and saved the heart’, who ...”

“... besides. When the Bill making the registration of births compulsory was introduced in 1836, Lord John Russell, recommending it to Parliament, said that everyone would ‘so soon perceive the benefit of having their children’s names inserted in the general register that it would not be very long before every one would be willing to concur in carrying out ...”

“... Still, there is only one staggering omission. He describes the genesis of physiology under Michael Foster but never mentions Adrian, Hodgkin or Huxley, all Nobel Laureates and masters of Trinity, who immediately after the war worked in the most prestigious biological department which pullulated with FRS. The greatest change in social life? Brooke is in no ...”

“... more (or less) might be involved. We were entirely separate. This was not an environment to foster a broad or balanced social view. In the more public services such a view could be fostered simply by contact – however vicarious – with the outside world. In the secret services – just like Oxbridge colleges – it appears this didn’t apply. Edward ...”