“... where my father had built a house, I’d never been back as an adult. I had also never had a first-class air ticket, never written a full-length screenplay and never been met at the airport by someone handing over $500 in cash. Because I had been surviving abroad on the equivalent of $100 a week and had no American reserves, this piquant financial arrangement ...”

“... then seen put forward. I was at the meeting not because of any left-wing views, but because the war was of some personal interest to me, as in 1952 I was due to be conscripted and likely to find myself fighting in it. What was so astonishing at the meeting – and also embarrassing – was to find Mrs Kettle weeping over the plight of North Korea and having ...”

“... discover the emptiness and fraudulence at its core. Somewhere Morris is, or rather was, an upper-class English gent imbued with the values of his sex and class – the family on his mother’s side descends from ‘modest English squires’. When Morris sheds maleness, it is therefore a patriotic, militarist identity, with ...”

“... revealed the moment Hastings’s curtain went up on a tea-party in the garden of Viv’s middle-class family, with the backcloth portraying a mansion considerably larger than Blenheim Palace. This social slip, entailed by Hastings’s theory that Tom married Viv as a step in his social climbing, only epitomised all the more serious things that went wrong ...”

“... oratory, drama, magnificent buildings – but it was also a violent, faction-ridden, capricious, war-mongering, slave-owning society, clinging precariously to its privileged position, and regularly picking fights it couldn’t win. It doesn’t exactly sound like the Google (company motto: ‘Don’t be evil’) of the ancient world. However, Josiah Ober is ...”

“... two most personal books, The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition, in which he declared war on Platonic philosophy. Yet these books only hinted at the radicalism of his intentions.Deleuze and Guattari had an instant intellectual rapport. Both men were frustrated with the ‘Mummy-Daddy’ focus of psychoanalysis. By understanding desire in terms of ...”

“... Home’, he provides this portrait of his father late in life: My father, who had flown in World War I, Might have continued to invest his life In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife. But the race was run below, and the point was to win. Too late now, I make out in his blue gaze (Through the smoked glass of being thirty-six) The soul eclipsed by ...”

“... North blew up, they realised that they had a central role to play in guiding an Irish professional class away from ancient pieties. They tried it on me. I went to University College Dublin in 1972 to study History and English. If there was a forbidden ‘f’ word or a forbidden ‘c’ word while we studied there, they were ‘Fenian’ and ...”

“... teachers. Against all the odds posed by his clearly superior abilities, he contrived to get second-class honours in Classics, not so much for neglecting the books as for being contemptuous of Plato. He discovered Swinburne – at that time a writer banned from the University Library – and went mad for him. So mad, really, that he never recovered. When he ...”

“... had (immediately) chosen Moscow; and there he was to remain until the end of the Second World War, true to the party he had joined in 1918 and apparently at one with the Stalinist consequences of the Leninism to which he had fully committed himself by the early 1920s. His friend and antagonist, exact contemporary and truest counterpart, was Ernst ...”

“... away, she followed. A recruitment phase began. The women were mostly from broken down middle-class families. Manson told them they were beautiful and nothing was their fault. The message was to do away with guilt and shame, with the ego, with worldly possessions, with the hang-ups of the outside world. He would fill the void. He started saying he was the ...”

“... death close linkedHad paced the enormous cloud, almost had won            War on the sun;Till now, like Icarus mid-ocean-drowned,            Hands, wings, are found.The prosaic detail behind this was that ‘Marston’ was in the University Flying Club; but Spender conjures him into a zooming superhero, a doomed Lawrentian ...”

“... and left him with his grandparents in Algiers. He lived there until 1961, when, with the Algerian war of independence nearing its end, he was sent to live with his paternal grandmother, Henriette, in the Yonne, south-east of Paris. By this time, his parents had divorced. Michel only saw them during the holidays. ‘I grew up with the clear knowledge that a ...”

“... on the struggle against Fascism – in Spain and then, with the rise of Nazism and the onset of war, throughout most of Europe. After the war the AIA divided, basically between pro and anti-Soviet wings, or, in more general terms, between an increasingly politicised and an increasingly depoliticised wing. Berger, at that ...”

“... American canon. In 1965 Invisible Man was chosen as the most distinguished novel since World War Two by a collection of ‘200 prominent authors, critics and editors’ for Book Week magazine. In 1978, when Wilson Quarterly canvassed professors of American literature on the most important novels published in the United States since World ...”