“... paragraphs, quoted in succession though they appear in the book in parallel: When the critic George Steiner looked through the entries for the Sunday Times Baudelaire translation competition he was judging in 1968, he was no doubt a little surprised. Someone had submitted more than thirty versions of the same poem. When the journalist Jürgen Serke came ...”

“... a film dedicated to the good of mutual understanding, Davies played with avuncular benignity by Walter Huston, and the film introduced by Davies himself. The movies actually written by Communists in the late 1930s (the harvest years of the Hollywood CP, after the ‘fair seed-time’ of the Popular Front) are almost all unwatchable. Murray Kempton in Part ...”

“... want to lose or reduce the extravagance but can’t quite fall for it either. An example would be Walter Benjamin’s wonderful remark about missed experiences in Proust: None of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration ...”

“... one had ever paid so much money for a social media company before.Musk’s authorised biographer, Walter Isaacson, couldn’t make sense of it – ‘I thought it was insane,’ he told the Financial Times – and Musk’s friends and family didn’t understand it either. Wasn’t Musk supposed to be busy getting humans to Mars by 2025? Kimbal Musk told his ...”

“... lacking its nuclear pit was accidentally released from another B-47 and landed in the backyard of Walter Gregg’s family home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. Its high-explosive casing detonated, digging a 35-foot crater, destroying the family Chevrolet, killing six chickens and deeply embarrassing the Pentagon, which had led the American public to believe ...”

“... for a while longer, a wish shared by many ‘wise men’ of the West, from Alexandre Kojève to George Kennan, who preferred a world of bounded empires to one of nation-states. But by war’s end no one was in a position to gainsay the broad shape of the Pax Americana. Perry Anderson, in American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers, his first sustained critique ...”

“... Cuneiform studies have come far since 1872, when George Smith, assistant keeper in the Oriental Department of the British Museum, engrossed the December meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology with a paper on ‘The Chaldean Account of the Deluge’. Among the tablets recovered from Assurbanipal’s library at Nineveh he had found an account of a world-wide flood which resembled the narrative of Genesis not only in its main outline but even in detail ...”

“... at Berkeley in the spring of 1975, Joan Didion confessed that she had stolen the title of George Orwell’s celebrated attempt at an explanation because she liked the idea of ‘three short unambiguous words’ that ‘share a sound’. ‘In many ways,’ Didion declared, ‘writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of ...”

“... periodical, the New Age, and to meet Scottish intellectuals including the composer Francis George Scott (to whom Hugh MacDiarmid would dedicate A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle) and a French lecturer at Glasgow University called Denis Saurat (who is often credited with giving the 1920s Scottish literary renaissance its name). Most important, ‘in the ...”

“... to the avowedly nostalgic John Betjeman. Likewise, we get no more than a brief sidelong glimpse of George Orwell. So be it. Let’s say that Harris’s concern is with a certain strand of artistic production, rather than with an overarching historical narrative. She has chosen Romantic Moderns as her title because she believes that in all her favourite work of ...”

“... with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be ...”

“... with which Webster opens her book could as easily have been plucked from wartime discourse. Walter White, the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, claimed that African Americans tended to be well received in Britain, which he attributed to the fact that ‘black GIs, unlike their white compatriots, did not consider ...”

“... people in many other categories were and are routinely stripped of rights. Heller-Roazen refers to George Orwell, who in ‘How the Poor Die’ recounted his treatment as an indigent ‘specimen’ in a charity hospital in France in 1921, and to the sociologist Erving Goffman, whose dissertation in 1953 concerned the ‘civil inattention’ practised on ...”

“... then. The Shakespearean parallels offer a fittingly British version of enchantment. It’s as if George Eliot tried to write Middlemarch now and realised that the realist novel isn’t up to it in the 21st century. You can’t draw together into a single narrative an island culture wholly recalcitrant to unity. But Eliot/Smith thinks: wait! Late romance! We ...”

“... including John Barth, William Gass, John Hawkes, Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis, Robert Coover, Walter Abish and Kurt Vonnegut. Sontag was the only woman writer invited, Pynchon the only writer not to turn up. Vonnegut’s wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, recorded the event for posterity. On the other hand, the final words of ‘January’, the last of ...”