“... reproductive rights being curtailed in many states, getting the amendment in the constitution was more important than ever, she told me. Most other liberal democracies had constitutional provisions of this sort, ‘even Japan’. She didn’t mention it, but it was the 104th anniversary of the day American women won the right to vote, with the ratification of ...”

“... Faulkner, then in dire penury, had concocted to sell and which, one hopes to his annoyance, sold more than all his previous works. Today his entire canon is available but no volume that I have looked at in our local public library has been issued to more than three subscribers each year. His fine As I lay dying, which ...”

“... of encephalitis lethargia that was triggered by the flu. But that’s it. Most people know more about smallpox, or the plague of 1665. Why should this be? The flu was unprecedented in its virulence and global in its effects. Yet it came and went like a noxious fog, like something outside human understanding. Aids (or HIV-disease, as medical authorities ...”

“... paragraphs to a page) and separated by a space equivalent to two lines of type. Every page or so a more substantial suspension of movement – a ‘beat’, it might be called in the theatre – is marked by a row of three dots. A paragraph both preceded and followed by a set of such dots is a rare event and perhaps flags up a special status for the words ...”

“... biggest-selling newspaper in the world. There was a crackle and dazzle to it. Fleet Street had no more experienced and mischievous proprietor than Lord Beaverbrook, no more technically gifted editor than Arthur Christiansen, and few more celebrated reporters than the paper’s defence and ...”

“... Fludde: all those young boys, for one thing; an apparently Christian pageant that sometimes feels more like a complaint against God than a celebration; a body of musicians designed – because of the presence of so many children – to be out of tune with itself, so that the notes are constantly shifting and wavering, unsettling the consolations of Tallis’s ...”

“... liked to talk about American speech, and to say (correctly) that their poems captured that speech more than their peers’ poems could. Both achieved popularity despite the grim attitude in their best poems, and both discovered too late that their authorised biographers despised them. (In Creeley’s case, the culprit was Ekbert Faas, whose unwieldy tome ...”

“... collabos when he died in 1944. Fernandez expresses hurt that in those years Liliane didn’t show more enthusiasm when sending him off to meet his father, an emotion that hindsight might have been expected to put into perspective. She was a passionate anti-Nazi – and there were pupils at Fernandez’s own school who were shot by the Germans. In a ...”

“... blue – but significantly unable to cope with Latin syntax or word-order, a matter which needs more thought. Failures of that kind have been going on for a long time, and have had an effect of cumulative collective amnesia. The author of the book under review pointed out not long ago in a piece in the THES that till recently you could go into most ...”

“... A ‘hereditary predisposition to suicide’ was believed to run in families, and even M. Carey Thomas, the progressive president of Bryn Mawr, ‘placed considerable emphasis on students’ family back-grounds and the mental characteristics inherited from their parents’. In June 1904, Kathy, now Kate, married Tom Hepburn, a classmate of her sister ...”

“... the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms. Watt embedded his compelling account of the novel’s literary and philosophical co-ordinates in a sociology of readership. Britain, the story goes, developed an extensive ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... entrepreneurs to fund the studio project, and one of them, Joel Rosenman, suggested it might make more sense to put money into a live event. Woodstock Ventures was duly constituted and the team set to work on a ‘music and arts fair’. But who would lease the land for a gathering of fifty or sixty thousand people? Lang had set his heart on a farm in ...”

“... It was all proper wood. Every drawer was stuffed with tablecloths and skirts she never wore. More than one of the drawers in her bedroom was kept for handkerchiefs. ‘There’s never anything in them magazines,’ she said, ‘except holidays. I like the holiday ones, with Spain and that. You can go to Spain now as if it was Scarborough. For the price ...”

“... months.Numerous friends and acquaintances testified to Barnes’s ‘complexity’. The painter Thomas Hart Benton, for instance, described him as ‘magnificent … friendly, kindly, hospitable’, but also ‘a ruthless, underhanded son of a bitch’. With Barnes, there was no middle ground, minuscule self-doubt and no remorse over those he ...”