“... think, too much ... I am too civilised’ is inconsistent with this other frame of mind. Please grant me the right to inconsistency: in the camp our state of mind was unstable, it oscillated from hour to hour between hope and despair. The coherence I think one notes in my books is an artifact, a rationalisation a posteriori. PR: Survival in Auschwitz was ...”

“... have many distinguished old boys though one which it never seems to acknowledge was the critic James Agate. This reticence may be on account of Agate’s well-known propensity to drink his own piss. 13 June. Three police acquitted in the case of Joy Gardner who died after being gagged with 13 inches of tape, a restraining belt and leg irons. It’s not ...”

“... literature’ and to modernism in particular presents problems. It is as easy to feel that James and Wells are incompatible as it is to reject the notion that Dostoevsky (let alone Oedipus Rex) has any family relationship with the detective story. When we come to Orlando or Pynchon, the conviction of incompatibility remains firm, but the arguments ...”

“... been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 August, Oxford. To Oxford and the Holywell Music Room where Bodley’s librarian emeritus David Vaisey and I have a conversation about our time at Oxford in the 1950s. David and I were first aware of each other at the scholarship examination in Exeter ...”

“... Enron sought, even if funding had not flowed in their direction from the corporation. Bush did not grant Enron the single decision it perhaps most desired: for the US Administration to withdraw its objections to the Kyoto Protocol limiting greenhouse gas emissions. If it seems odd that the corporation was in favour of Kyoto, remember Enron’s commitment to ...”

“... then called, also entitled me to three years of Scottish Education Department postgraduate student grant. Sussex, I read, offered a one-year taught MA in philosophy, which included Marx and Hegel: the ideal conversion course. I applied, I was accepted, I had funding, off I went.The University of Sussex, established in 1961, was the first of Britain’s ...”

“... of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger ...”

“... this and some of that – a little Muhammad Ali for straight sex, some Kissinger for savvy, Cary Grant for looks, Jack Nicholson for entertainment, plus André Malraux or some Jew for brains. Commonest fantasy there is.’ So common, in fact, that it has already been given an outing in Mr Sammler’s Planet: ‘he fetched back, for example, a statement by ...”

“... claimed to have the world’s longest bar – 101 stools – and hosted the likes of Ulysses S. Grant and the Vanderbilts. It had burned down, he was told, ‘a year or so ago’. On 11 May he inspected the site: Old bedsprings twisted with heat; puddles of molten glass; washbowls that had fallen through to the foundations; a flight of stone steps leading ...”

“... to finish her degree, and fearful that her marriage would mean the withdrawal of her Fulbright grant, got Ted to stay away. Poetry took her love poems: a good omen. ‘We shall be living proof that great writing comes from a pure, faithful, joyous creative bed. I love you; I will live like an intellectual nun without you; I need no one but you,’ she ...”

“... on Irish radio in 1995 and published in The Great Irish Famine: The Thomas Davis Lecture Series, James Donnelly remarked thatthroughout the rest of the Famine years, the Gregory clause or ‘Gregoryism’ became a byword for the worst miseries of the disaster – eviction, exile, disease and death. When in 1874 Canon John O’Rourke, the parish priest of ...”

“... His Teens’, Melville intrudes directly to caution the reader – much in the manner of Henry James in Portrait of a Lady, on behalf of the romantically youthful Isabel Archer – not precipitously to judge someone destined to suffer unduly. Paragraphs in which his characters are allowed to exult in their situations tend to conclude with dropped hints of ...”

“... to do, and where could they go from here? ‘Supervisors at the IRS’s regional complex in Lake James township are trying to determine why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for four days before anyone asked if he was feeling all right.’ Perhaps Wallace was writing toward paradise, where the forms are also ...”

“... same kind: it was adopted during a brief period when Britain had neither a king nor a Parliament (James II having first dissolved Parliament and then fled), by an ad hoc convention which offered William of Orange the Crown, accompanied by a Declaration of Rights which the convention, endorsed the next year by a lawfully summoned Parliament, passed into law as ...”

“... bright day that brings forth the adder, And that craves wary walking. Crown him that, And then I grant we put a sting in him That at his will he may do danger with. Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins Remorse from power; and to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known when his affections sway’d More than his reason. But ’tis a common proof That ...”