“... longue while Frost typed. There was something glossy and irreal about Twin Peaks, the town ‘five miles south of the Canadian border, twelve miles west of the state line’, where a high schooler could look like Elizabeth Taylor in saddle shoes and MacLachlan, as Special Agent Dale Cooper, had the same quality Kael detected ...”

“... nexus from which the Origin emerged:        ‘I never dreamedthat islands sixty miles apart, made of the            same stone, of nearly equal height in the same climate, could have different tenants.’ Fast forward             twenty yearsand you see him write of this scatter-burst ...”

“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ...”

“... to build careers on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal ...”

“... Depression, convinced his future lay in music. In 1933 he sent a clarinet sonata to the pianist Richard Buhlig who, impressed by its maturity, sent it on to the composer Henry Cowell, then a major figure in the American avant-garde and an outspoken advocate of non-Western musical traditions. He liked the piece enough to include it in a concert programme and ...”

“... stage of evolution the family has reached – where family members can be at once thousands of miles apart and pressing in on one another on the phone and the internet every minute of every day, never more than a few hours away by plane. The nuclear family has become the quantum family, its particles entangled over vast stretches of space. And vast ...”

“... desire to build a ‘Brasilia of the North’ on top of the Newcastle town centre laid out by Richard Grainger in the 1830s. It is urbanity in and of itself that attracts Hatherley. On his road trip to Glasgow he remarks (one assumes the humour is unintentional) that the first thing he notices in the purlieus of the motorway is ‘space ...”

“... efforts to reinvent a British tradition of patriotic, elite paternalism were heavily influenced by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book The Spirit Level, with its strange subtitle, ‘Why Equality Is Better for Everyone’. Its underlying assumption was that inequality could only be tackled by an appeal to the rationality and self-interest of those ...”

“... on the first page of The Maltese Falcon, and the descriptions keep coming. Even Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, who appears on page four and is dead by page eight, can’t be skipped. ‘He was of medium height, solidly built, wide in the shoulders, thick in the neck, with a jovial heavy-jawed red face and some grey in his close-trimmed hair.’ You would ...”

“... as a ‘Toxic Super-Ego’, a concept he has learned from the charismatic YouTube psychologist Richard Grannon. But Charles reckons there’s something about Grannon himself that ‘doesn’t entirely add up’. If he’s really a lost soul like Charles, how can he also be ‘a life-coach/therapist and teach high-level martial arts and do a series of other ...”

“... more detached, even principled, vision of the world. Such might be our expectation of a Tory wet, miles removed from the scene of the action. But not at all, as his autobiography spends some time recounting. At bottom, Heath remains what he has always been, an insatiable attender on the upper echelons of global power. He longs for the world of Tito, Churchill ...”

“... populate Pentagon and State Department committees, including the Defense Policy Board, run by Richard Perle (who was appointed by Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz), where Israeli security is equated with US security. According to Jason Vest in the Nation, JINSA spends the ‘bulk of its budget taking a bevy of retired US generals and admirals ...”

“... his biographers in dismissing them in a page or two as ‘somewhat crackbrained’, to quote Richard Shannon. Shannon’s two-volume life offers a fuller account of Gladstone’s intellectual development than other modern biographies, yet even he allots as much space to Macaulay’s mesmerisingly destructive review of The State in Its Relations with the ...”

“... and brothers’. Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the ...”

“... why Israel had to call up its reserve forces when Egypt mobilised its army in the Sinai peninsula, miles from the border? Segev notes that Israel had seen no need to respond to similar manoeuvres a few months earlier. Was Nasser’s rhetoric the new element that precipitated war? Perhaps. Were Israel’s warnings to Syria, especially Rabin’s warning, some ...”