“... allies and the substantial egos of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Field Marshal Montgomery and General Patton. Dad thought Eisenhower was a man with ballast, a leader. But the Finnegans wanted to argue Ike’s policies.Note the trace of red-baiting in the bit about the steel company (‘un-American’); the implication that ...”

“... in Love to have been a soft-focus, rural idyll, and I fall to imagining a red sun rising behind a field of gently rippling Bohemian corn, and, beyond it, a girl in a dirndl beckoning seductively. ‘Good morning, Sales Ledger, this is Martine, how may I help you?’ I have been put through.Phone-hold music is a late, trivial but characteristic effect of the ...”

“... he ultimately settled on psychiatry after reading in Krafft-Ebing’s textbook that it was a field where theory still bore the personal stamp of the author. Jung arrived at the Burghölzli hospital on 10 December 1900. Thus began what could have been the greatest psychiatric career of the 20th century. No account of Jung is adequate that does not take ...”

“... his fellow countrymen’s propensity to declare, in the words of the Paul Anka song popularised by Frank Sinatra, ‘I did it my way.’ Thomas, however, construed these lines personally, as a challenge not only to his dithering, but also to his involuntary sense of poethood, in which choice, he insisted, played no part. ‘It is all very well,’ he wrote ...”

“... by a more pliable editor. His successor at the Sunday Times had been the excessively fastidious Frank Giles, though he didn’t last long either. Murdoch was quick to tell him that he must leave his desk, and that from now on he would be ‘editor emeritus’, adding that ‘“e” means you’re out, and “meritus” means you deserve it.’ Sometimes ...”

“... Murdoch is at her most endearing, earnestly practising ‘Greensleeves’ on the recorder in a field full of cows, discussing the international situation while wondering with rather more urgency whether the scenery will turn up in time. The journal evokes a Betjemanesque interwar world of japes and ginger biscuits, ‘strenuous breakfasts’ and ...”

“... Nixon would soon appoint to the Supreme Court) urged the defenders of capitalism to retake the field from their critics by establishing think tanks, media outlets and university professorships – all of which could help move ‘responsible opinion’ to the right, and did. At the same time, Nader started to over-reach. His Congress Project, an attempt to ...”

“... scholars some distance from the day to day concerns of those who actually toil in the literary field. And ‘genre’ – a staple of literary analysis in other historical periods – presents a special problem for modernism, which so often took pride in exploding or eluding it. Magazines, then, make for a nice object of study: still recognisable to both ...”

“... to listen to anyone. The Senate would pass his treaty or it would pass no treaty at all. Senator Frank Brandegee of Connecticut declared: ‘The president has strangled his own child.’ The flood of idealism that Wilson had unleashed dried up overnight. The enormous hope of yoking the exceptional destiny of the United States to the cause of world peace and ...”

“... to Whitney Balliett, ‘happens when your phrasing hardens’.Coleman made his career in ‘the field of music the white man calls jazz’, but his war on cliché extended far beyond it. He composed dissonant European art music for string quartet; played jagged electric funk with a band he called Prime Time (an important influence on the New York punk ...”

“... and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our feet, speaking of Hart Crane and the last words we would have in our mouths at that moment of surrender.’ His idol was Billie Holiday, who gives the name to one of his best short ...”

“... of work were a new existential value. David Storey may have been, even in a heavily contested field, the most inhibited British writer of his generation. He was born in 1933 and grew up in Wakefield, in a family that felt work was destiny and everything else was showing off. His father worked in a coal mine but Storey, while being paid to play rugby ...”

“... few trips to New York, including momentous visits to the Museum of Modern Art, where he catches a Frank Stella retrospective, and the Guggenheim Museum, where he sees a Moholy-Nagy exhibition. On his return to France, Bois gives up his own artmaking, and after a tedious course in Pau he decides against art history too. The siren call now comes from critical ...”

“... respectability he volunteers for Vietnam, where he serves his 365 days as a private in a field transport unit. The bulk of Buffalo Afternoon deals with the war. And it is clear that the veterans to whom Schaeffer listened did not mince their words. The novel contains hideous and wholly convincing battle descriptions. We learn the effect of white ...”

“... novelist, and so lavish in the employment of his gifts, that his occasional ventures into the field of poetry have in the past tended to be rather disappointing. The miraculous exuberance of his prose, seemingly so inexhaustible in its gathering of perceptions and engendering of conceits, might have led one to hope that his verse would display something ...”