“... is possible. If Marrot’s biography has an old-fashioned flavour even for its period, this may be partly because Galsworthy himself was, long before his death, an uneasy survivor from a vanished age. Younger than Conrad or Yeats or Kipling, his mind and outlook seem fixed, as theirs do not, in an epoch that itself did not survive his prime – and this ...”

“... out. In 1851, in a note on ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’, Ruskin wrote: ‘Now in order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: They must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it – not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of other people for its confirmation, but a ...”

“... ensured its defeat at the polls. The Wilson era ended, in a sense, not on 16 March 1976, but on 3 May 1979. It ended in failure. In Final Term, the man who led the Labour Party for 13 years, and presided over nearly nine years of British decline, offers no sort of analysis of what went wrong and no kind of theory about what might go right. The book, I am ...”

“... by the society that produced it, in terms of the roles, acknowledged or unacknowledged, that it may have played, of the conflicts implicit in individual works and of what they did and did not portray. The history of art cannot be the history of art alone. Well, no, but it is difficult to see here, or in the essays themselves, anything essential to this ...”

“... the volume was not so interpreted by contemporaries on its appearance in September 1798, when it may actually have disappointed radical expectations. The first name on the title page was that of the out-of-town publisher Joseph Cottle of Bristol. It’s an odd fact that Cottle authors – the youthful Southey and Coleridge alone, together, or in conjunction ...”

“... The total tax dollars invested in poverty programmes in Swisher County, controversial though it may be, is dwarfed by the subsidies the county receives through various federal farm programmes. In 1999, farm subsidies totalled $28.7 million for Swisher County . . . which means that almost everybody in Swisher County, regardless of race, relies on a handout ...”

“... she reminds him of Hardy’s Eustacia Vye. His sea-loving family recalls the Peggotys in David Copperfield. His uncle at the tiller is like Tashtego in Moby-Dick. His mother, on the other hand, has not read a book since high school – ‘then she had read Ivanhoe and considered it a colossal waste of time.’ While her son sits at school discussing ...”

“... Forest, as there is in Rick Blaine’s self-pitying drunk scene in Casablanca. ‘Proof,’ says David Thomson of the latter in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, ‘of how far Bogart needed a great artist to help him rise above the level of maudlin resentment.’ Thomson suggests that self-regard prevented him from acting beyond the obvious. He is at his ...”

“... he didn’t credit the men and women he met in the East End – ‘a subservient lot’, he told David Marquand years later – with his conversion to socialism. That may have already been underway but would be shaped by his work teaching in the industrial north.His quarrel with Oxford in a sense drove him there. In ...”

“... the Paris Review, McSweeney’s and the New Yorker. He is also a journalist, specialising, like David Foster Wallace, in first-person-singular expeditions into curious reaches of American culture. Tower’s non-fiction adventures have included a bicycle odyssey along the New Orleans levee a year after Hurricane Katrina, a search for a possibly extinct ...”

“... of being the odd woman out in a number of studies of the poets of the New York School. The group may have been a chimera (in John Ashbery’s words, ‘we happened to be friends’), but the label – borrowed from the abstract expressionist painters in their circle, and marketed through Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry – has somehow ...”

“... in Axler’s proposed salvation-by-child, or by love or sex (‘He who forms a tie is lost’ – David Kepesh’s friend George O’Hearn, telling it straight in The Dying Animal). They won’t save him, and nor will solitude: it’s the absence of ties which has brought him to this pass. Axler has no family: no memories of dear Morty Sabbath to stay his ...”

“... has given organisational form to a new European left-wing populism. In the European elections of May 2014, with a tiny, crowd-funded budget and just four months of existence, it gained 1.2 million votes and five MEPs. By the end of the year it led the two establishment parties in the polls. The roots of Podemos lie in the huge 2011 indignados protests ...”

“... attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive Englishman posed the already canonised Americans a grave threat. ‘We cannot be all the writers all the time,’ she wrote. ‘We can only be who we are … Writers do not write what they want, they ...”

“... temporary safety’. According to Hayden, we must also consider the number of innocent people who may be killed in a future terrorist attack. ‘What might be admirable for a court system is unconscionable for an intelligence agency,’ he writes. Hayden was appointed to lead the National Security Agency in 1999 by Bill Clinton, and stayed on through 9/11 up ...”