“... content but all the complex paraphernalia of professional intellectualism – takes care of the first difficulty. The second, the inescapable alterity of past lives and experiences, is simply denied. The line between past and present is erased with a magic phrase found in virtually every work of feminist hagiography: ‘ahead of their time’. ‘Like the ...”

“... hadn’t yet formulated itself as an issue in the culture. When the realisation did come, it at first didn’t seem of crucial importance, but that view soon began to change. The gay past in writing is sometimes explicit and sometimes hidden, while the gay present is, for the most part, only explicit. Soon in the Western world being gay will no longer ...”

“... of the story behind these Hart-Davis luncheons à deux. I can’t remember when Hart-Davis and I first met. Not at Eton, where, two years younger than myself, he was latterly absent for long periods owing to ill health. I did not even know him by sight. He went up to Balliol the term after I came down (and remained from choice only two terms in residence). I ...”

“... home by a caption in Bryan Appleyard’s biography: Rogers about to leave Belsize Grove for the first Lloyd’s interview in the Yves St Laurent suit’. It was grey, bought specially for the occasion, and worn with a borrowed tie. Appleyard’s account of the historical and theoretical lineage of Rogers’s architecture analyses ideas which had been ...”

“... In the early years, MacArthur was also associated with the Y chromosome and Wasp heritage. The first list of 21 winners, in 1981, contained 19 males, none of them carrying obvious Hispanic or Asian-American surnames. The July 2000 list has 12 women among 25 winners, and a generous speckling of names like Muñoz and Horng-Tzer Yau. Female and minority ...”

“... The future​ flashed before my eyes in all its pre-ordained banality. Embarrassment, at first, to the exclusion of all other feelings. But embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness, the sort that comes over you when you are set on a track by something outside your control, and which, although it is not your experience, is so known in all its cultural forms that you could unscrew the cap of the pen in your hand and jot down in the notebook on your lap every single thing that will happen and everything that will be felt for the foreseeable future ...”

“... Gay Wilson Allen to write William James: A Biography, which appeared in 1967). Edel was at first going to produce an edition of Henry James’s letters, but decided to delay for over twenty-five years while he put out his four biographical volumes, edited The Diary of Alice James, and wrote introductions for huge numbers of reissues. By doing so he ...”

“... his life’s work, and Herrick’s pride in his achievement is marked by the fact that this is the first volume in England to refer to a collection of lyric poems as ‘works’. In the heady historicist days of the 1980s Hesperides was seen as a defiant and despairing gesture of royalism. As Herrick urged his mistresses to gather rosebuds, and rejoiced in ...”

“... the pardon itself was a betrayal, a ‘dishonour’, some said. In fact, Dreyfus’s own first impulse was to refuse the offer – ‘the right of the innocent man,’ he wrote, ‘is not clemency but justice’ – but he was persuaded he would be better able to fight for his rehabilitation if he was out of prison. He published the following ...”

“... world’, but he doesn’t, he keeps her imprisoned in his apartment. This doesn’t daunt her at first. She can invent games for that as for any other condition, and for much of the novel she is able to enjoy her own sleek intelligence and sense of control. Even at the end, about to die in a riding accident, she imagines winning a last round against her ...”

“... through the consciously poetical, to the forceful but semantically oblique assertion: But take Ruth who drowned last week. I used to fancy her – now all I think is what water can do, easing off shoes, making light of the dense net of her tights. To hell with out of place! That’s the fucking Thames dribbling down your face! But the deaths of ...”

“... that he will sell his story to a national daily, find a new mistress, perhaps be reunited with his first wife, he goes for an enthusiastic trot down Fleet Street and runs into the path of a speeding van. The plot is intricate, perhaps a little overburdened, as comic plots tend to be, and wrought into a continuous narrative with no chapter divisions to mark the ...”

“... it’). Neither book rewrites the history of postwar poetry, and each seems to accept that for the first three decades a canon is already pretty much shaped. Partly this is because time has done the sifting for them: Sorley MacLean, who Armitage and Crawford make a point of including as if he were on the margin, is far from being a stranger to mainstream ...”

“... and the ‘three parents’ whose times shaped his life. They were Hilde, or Hildegard Pauline Ruth Gerwing, and the two physicists she successively married, who passed information to the Soviets on the atom-bomb project between 1942 and 1945: Berti, or Engelbert Egon August Ernst Broda, and Alan Nunn May, who was sentenced to ten years for it. Broda, who ...”

“... at the culture he eviscerated in his fiction, and his letters become a catalogue of tiny hurts. To Ruth Miller, a former student, apropos a piece in the New York Times by Louis Simpson occasioned by Humboldt’s Gift: It was cheap, mean, it did me dirt … I don’t ask myself why the Times prints such miserable stuff, why I must be called an ingrate, a ...”