“... he was there soon enough: for breakfast the next day. I went up in the elevator with Edward Jay Epstein, once a conspiracy theorist on the Kennedy assassination and a party-giver at his Upper East Side apartment, and we walked into what used to be an artist’s studio. Drinks, canapés, hello, your name is, I’m Inigo, what, Inigo who’s ...”

“... deities – overwhelming images of warning, perfection, adoration and revenge. He was born in the winter of 1922 in the French Canadian section of Lowell, Massachusetts, the third child and second son of Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac. Within the family, within the small, isolated Cannuck community, he was known from the first as ‘Ti-Jean’ – ‘Little ...”

“... national asset. The same was true of Britain during the Great War, as may be discovered from Jay Winter’s superb scholarly analysis. The subject-matter is more specialised than his title suggests. This is a socio-economic historian’s investigation of the impact of war on population trends and civilian health, with an epilogue, which reads a bit ...”

“... question underlies the instructions and acknowledgments that pass between members of the family of Jay Follet on the day after his death. Rufus, the son, wants to believe that his father was good, and he comes to believe it, over the murmur of voices with hints and rumours that he was a drinker and a fast driver and a poor breadwinner, and over the priest’s ...”

“... the water the colour of Paul Newman’s eyes, though it was deemed too cold to be usable in ‘winter’. (Appropriately enough, I had met Hockney during my previous visit to LA, through my artist brother. His brother was there too, giving, I think, financial advice to the painter. Looking out over LA, Hockney’s brother thrilled us with tales of his ...”

“... had been the great business of life.’ He supplemented his meagre income by teaching through the winter months. This drudgery brought nothing more than subsistence; he left the farm poorer than he’d been when he arrived. But he had gathered the materials for The Canadian Naturalist, his first book. His health, faith and optimism were undamaged by the bleak ...”

“... in honour of the Federalist Papers (1787-88) published by Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, is a conservative law society dedicated to upholding with unswerving rigidity the original intent of the constitution’s founders. By 1998, the Society had around five thousand student members at 145 law schools, as well as fifteen thousand practising ...”

“... who sought the company, within the Party, of fellow Wykehamists (Richard Crossman, Douglas Jay), other public school boys (Benn, Crosland) or public school wannabes like Roy Jenkins, and who, to top it all, was having an affair with an aristocratic Tory woman and loved nothing better than to dance the night away at the Gargoyle Club, the haunt of ...”

“... the next. Most of what he got down on paper was tossed out until things began to come together as winter ended in early 1924. Fitzgerald’s faith in his novel grew as he laboured to make it ‘the very best I’m capable of … or even as I feel sometimes, something better than I’m capable of’. Perkins received and considered many title variants as the ...”

“... the key decisions fell to Wilson and two inexperienced colleagues, Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay. He responded to their calm assurance with a calculating vacillation that laid the basis for a lasting distrust, even as devaluation was agreed on and announced in September 1949. The economy recovered more quickly than ministerial relations, which worsened ...”

“... not to take part in the shooting, and suffered no punishment. The other helpful book is Robert Jay Lifton’s magnificent The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). Lifton interviewed a number of doctors who had worked at Auschwitz, some of them prisoners and others SS medical officers on the camp staff. No research comes ...”

“... gave me the original impetus to consider the possibility of writing a novel’. In 1985, he told Jay McInerney: ‘I got really interested in the whole process, and thought, I wish I had written this book. I started writing stories about two years after she published her novel.’ He translated Sartre’s Huis Clos and Borges’s story ‘The Circular ...”

“... to prevent the state taking on new ones, including a new national debt. For Sieyès, during the winter of 1788-89, the stakes were even higher. He was terrified that the King himself would renege on his debts, and that the people’s representatives would not try to stop him. The profligacy of the King and his Court had produced the crisis of the state’s ...”

“... when our ship failed to come in, claim we had hated all along. Ellis provided them, and so did Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz and others: these were writers who shared a sensibility and social milieu; they came to be identified with the same unsavoury behaviour of their characters. They were declared spokespeople for a generation that, once the initial ...”

“... audience, Lockwood makes a rare foray into figurative language. With a flourish worthy of Stephen Jay Gould, he produces a metaphor drawn from Swift and the Scientific American to exemplify the idea that there is an ‘approximate correlation between the size of a work of art and the “amount of aesthetic experience” that it contains’. That implied ...”