“... By ironic circumstance, I spent an evening recently at the home of a major collector of contemporary art, where the topic arose of the house which Bill Gates, the legendarily successful head of Microsoft, is having built for himself at a rumoured cost of anything up to $30 million. We sought to understand how a house could cost so much, and the somewhat stammering conjecture was that it must be due to the complex system of state-of-the-art electronics a figure like Gates would insist on having ...”

“... Christine Brooke-Rose’s story of how this new book came to be is that she set out to write about her life, and instead produced a kind of antibiography. It’s described in the jacket’s blurb by Carcanet as ‘an autobiographical novel with a difference’ which ‘uses life material to compose a third-person fiction ...”

“... to put themselves and what they wanted to say into an artifice that would enhance and dramatise by disguise, to the point where disguise itself became the object of art. Homosexuality may have been at the core of this knowledge, but more important was the instinct to personalise sexuality, so that it referred to themselves alone, a pure individualness in ...”

“... the most eventful in modern times. Unlike her husband, Katharine Graham had no ambition to be a prime mover in the ante-chambers of Presidential power. Events, in the shape of Watergate, forced themselves on her. Although it doesn’t seem to have been her purpose, no single person – politician, judge, prosecutor, witness or journalist – did more ...”

“... life tend to assume both that history will take them at their own estimation, and that it will be written by disinterested Solomons, free from prejudice, passion, envy and the desire for fame or money. William Lamb, second Viscount Melbourne, prime minister in 1834 and 1835-41, had no such illusions. He loved reading ...”

“... extensive knowledge of his previous work. As far as I can tell, this is deliberate and it can be considered a flaw or a virtue depending on one’s view of writing in general and Kurt Vonnegut in particular. But one thing is clear: if you’re not familiar with the characters who have populated Vonnegut’s writing since, say, 1965 – including Vonnegut ...”

“... I met Vikram Seth by chance, he met me by mistake. He sat down next to me at an occasion he had never meant to attend. It was 6.45 p.m. on Thursday 25 March at the Royal Society of Literature in Bayswater. Seth had come to hear a friend of his read. I had come to hear the Minister for the Arts describe the Government’s support for literature ...”

“... The wedding was like a dream outside her power, or like a show unmanaged by her in which she was to have no part. The Member of the Wedding How to account for the vagaries of literary reputation? In the Forties and early Fifties, such disparate, talented young writers as Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and Flannery O’Connor were perceived as kindred; there was a highly publicised vogue of American Southern Gothic writing, abetted by photographs of the very camp Truman Capote reclining on a chaise-longue like a delicious dream of Oscar Wilde’s, and by lurid tales of the erratic, often inebriated behaviour of Carson McCullers, a literary prodigy to set beside Scott Fitzgerald in the previous generation ...”

“... a young man, Harold Rosenberg and Fried’s own mentor Clement Greenberg, started out wanting to be all-round literati before becoming specialists in the fine arts; but Fried, who was one of the first wave of art critics to have a PhD in art history, seems to have been the only one of that group to have been tempted, however briefly, ...”

“... of memory. For his characters, though, remembering is a strenuous business. There are traps to be avoided and barriers to overcome – an obstacle course of crying jags, guilt-ridden stupors, deathbed hallucinations. The frozen sea of the characters’ inner lives needs vigorous axe work, and the truths that are revealed will usually ...”

“... It is that part of Africa through which Livingstone trod or was carried, defined for strangers by its long, thin lake lying in the Rift Valley and by the ravages of the slave trade. Mdala came from a chiefly family and belonged to an ethnic group known as the Yao, who were one of the agents of that trade. Like many ...”

“... domain of interpretation: Mr Pope in the Height of his Fame, tho’ he had made himself, by Arts only He (as a Man of Genius) could stoop to, the Fashion, could not trust his Works with the Vulgar without Notes longer than the Work, and Self-praises, to tell them what he meant, and that he had a Meaning, in this or that Place. And thus every-one was ...”

“... it, of course: Eisenstadt hadn’t bothered with a patent. It was a lesson he didn’t need to be taught twice. He landed packing deals with a few smaller sugar companies, and began packaging a few other things as well. Business picked up, the company grew, and Eisenstadt took on his son, Marvin, as a partner. In the early 1950s, the only sugar substitute ...”

“... in the bid to assess Greenberg’s legacy: true to the way he lived, the art that he owned might be his most evocative biography. Nonetheless, Greenberg’s lasting influence prompts a curiosity about his day-to-day life, which Alice Goldfarb Marquis attempts to satisfy. And while Art Czar does better than Florence Rubenfeld’s Clement Greenberg: A Life ...”

“... and care,’ Dryden predicted that ‘His Ashes in a peaceful Urne [would] rest.’ It was not to be. Less than two years later, Dryden was addressing similar panegyrics to Charles II – Dryden attributed his switch to his being one of ‘the good [who had been] misled’; and Cromwell’s grandeur was by then generally ...”