“... early forties, she determined to break free, so she hooked up with a guy sixteen years her junior, Frank Perry, who wanted to be a film director. They had a few years of activity together in the 1960s. She wrote and he directed: David and Lisa, The Swimmer and Diary of a Mad Housewife. They were in the money and the awards, and they were married. Joan ...”

“... before 1933 became easy and familiar, a rarity with Hitler. Röhm, Hess, Goebbels, Hans Frank and many other friends of Hitler came and went . . . He enjoyed the family and artistic atmosphere at home with the Wagners, playing the kind uncle to the Wagner children, and fancied himself a friend of the arts. Almost every sentence jars. Hamann ...”

“... variation.’ Segal spent three years first as a postdoctoral fellow under the study’s director, Thomas Bouchard, and then as the assistant director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research. Her book answers critics of Mistra who argue, as Joseph Jay did in the American Journal of Psychology in 2001, that ‘the studies of separated twins ...”

“... is the most ‘European’ of Roth’s novels, and the tone of this passage will strike readers of Thomas Mann or Franz Kafka as familiar, perhaps even jadedly so. Yet the intensity of the commitment to Keatsian negative capability is remarkable in a writer so insistently loyal to the American novel’s covenant with quotidian, lived life. It is no small part ...”

“... In April 1959 Frank O’Connor wrote to his editor at the New Yorker to say that he had taken ‘the family up to Sligo to see how Yeats was getting on’. Since Yeats had been dead twenty years, he should have been getting on just fine. But: Even he seemed to be disgruntled. Kavanagh the ex-poet ran into me soon after I came home, and the following conversation took place exactly as recorded ...”

“... Stone was born in August 1937, nine months after Don DeLillo and three – we’re told – after Thomas Pynchon. Dog Soldiers, his second novel, made his name in the mid-1970s, and since then he has stubbornly held his ground on the upper slopes of American literary life. Fellowships, prizes, grants and commissions have rarely been in short supply, and his ...”

“... the relation between the biography of philosophers, or indeed authors in general, and their work. Thomas Nagel, for instance, has suggested that they have practically nothing to do with one another. Philosophical work is autonomous: it stands on its own feet, and interpretation of it should be based on what it contains. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, on the other ...”

“... philosopher abroad.’ And this is followed by a quotation, acknowledged only in the notes, from Thomas Bernhard’s fiction Wittgenstein’s Nephew: ‘Shaking their heads, they found it amusing that the world was taken in by the clown of their family, that that useless person had suddenly become famous and an intellectual giant in England.’ The ...”

“... day, he remembers something he didn’t actually get to see: the ground is ‘where I once missed Frank Woolley just out when I arrived having made something like 70 in half an hour’. Others send birthday greetings, only to be trumped by the recipient: ‘The day doesn’t bother me. Just another. No better no worse. But the avalanche is appalling.’ Or ...”

“... in Morse code by an international gang of drug traffickers.In​ 1860, seventeen years before Thomas Edison patented the phonograph, as a way of translating sounds into marks on waxed paper, a French cardiologist called Étienne-Jules Marey developed a portable sphygmograph, or ‘pulse-writer’, a device attached to the wrist which used a stylus to ...”

“... what he set out to do as a serious youngster devoted to the piano, classical as well as jazz.Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller – ‘Tom’ or ‘Thomas’ to his friends and family – had formidable technique, akin to a great athlete’s, and an exhaustless inventiveness and capacity to delight. His articulation of notes was ...”

“... Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his account of R.S. Thomas as ‘primarily a religious poet, tormented by a sense of God’s absence, and berating his parishioners for using refrigerators, washing machines, and other modern evils’, or of air-headedness in his remark that Mrs Yeats’s ability to hear spirit ...”

“... also an inherently unstable fiction.’This isn’t to say that pre-modern societies forbade frank speaking on principle. In classical times, free citizens were able to speak their minds in the assembly on matters of public interest, civic or religious. In Athens, this liberty was called parrhesia (speaking everything), in Latin, licentia. This sort of ...”

“... Ireland in the 1950s, a place not altogether unlike the white-ruled South Africa evoked in the frank confessional of David Schalkwyk’s opening chapter. In the apartheid world, the young Schalkwyk ‘was defined legally, socially and … psychologically as a “master”’, even as the material realities of bondage were masked (and painfully ...”

“... Gaudi in Barcelona, Wagner and Hoffman in Vienna, Guimard and Horta in France and Belgium, Frank Lloyd Wright in the US – of which he finds Clough, and the AA generally, unaware. I am not at all sure, either about the unawareness or about this ferment being the only one available. After all, Clough was plumb in the middle of the excitements of the ...”