“... good at it too (his letter to his daughter about how to write an essay is the best thing I’ve read on that ticklish subject). Having said that, he is also aware of his tendency to gravitate towards the glib or the showy (‘War is war and sometimes I think peace is too. Damn, there goes an epigram’), and often takes care to guard against it (‘didn’t ...”

“... interest, and is compelling to those whose experience it describes, but I probably wouldn’t read it for fun. Moreover, if I wanted to read literature from the developing world, I would go ahead and read literature from the developing world. At least that way I’d learn something ...”

“... none of the star power of already signed performers like Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee; his billing read ‘Extra Added Attraction’, and for Sinatra this particular gig was a pretty big deal. As Donald Clarke puts it in All or Nothing at All: A Life of Frank Sinatra (1997), the Paramount Theatre was ‘one of the shrines of ...”

“... Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera Tolz, Daniel Trilling Sofia Andrukhovychtranslated by Uilleam BlackerOn​  the ...”

“... book on the Moonies is one of the most striking pieces of investigative writing that I have read for a long time. It tells the story of how Sun Myung Moon (his American name – real name, Young Myung Mun), from his origins as a North Korean peasant, has built a politico-religious empire with an annual revenue of over half a billion dollars (making it ...”

“... the poet had died. Even within the brotherhood of the St Ives group, Graham’s poetry was little read or appreciated. The links between Graham and the painters Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, Karl Weschke and Sven Berlin were forged by his understanding of their work: it was his dedication to art, rather than his own art, that impressed ...”

“... 1944 in a letter to Frank, who would have enjoyed the affectionate teasing but wasn’t alive to read it. E.P. wrote poignantly about Frank and their time at the Dragon School: of his brother’s vulnerability – he was large and clumsy – and his own wish to fight on Frank’s behalf, blinded with tears, small fists flying left and right. Both boys ...”

“... capitalism, all of them shadowed by the threat of delusions and scams. It isn’t intended to be read as memoir. In 2017, Tolentino wrote a widely shared article for the New Yorker in which she somewhat mournfully observed that, following the election of Donald Trump, ‘the personal-essay boom is over’: ‘Individual ...”

“... Minutes, ITV’s World in Action or the BBC’s Panorama. At the weekend, you might settle in to read one of America’s news magazines, Time or Newsweek, or one of the Sunday papers: Britain’s Observer or Mail on Sunday or the immense Sunday edition of the New York Times (its biggest ever number, on 14 September 1987, had 1612 pages and weighed 12 ...”

“... was impossible to add fresh horror to the story of Mary killing her mother, but that was before I read Wilson’s version:Chairs, crockery, peas, beef, and bread on the floor; mother, bloody from chest to waist, lifeless; father, forehead gashed, bellowing; Aunt Sarah flinching in the corner. Mary towers over the riot, her eyes animal-wild. She has a ...”

“... much part of the movement as Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley or Kenneth Koch. With his Essex Poems, even Donald Davie, the very type of the English conservative poet-critic, appeared to have capitulated to ‘American’ Modernism, just as the more recent poems of Charles Tomlinson seemed touched by the dotty magniloquence of Charles Olson’s ‘Projective ...”

“... role played by patrons in the formation of public taste, an encomium it would be difficult to read without remembering that all the work in this particular show was purchased or commissioned by Charles Saatchi. No doubt he will be pleased to be compared with Isabella d’Este. If there is a serious theme running through these essays, it concerns the ...”

“... of her family, so was ‘familiar’ in that sense, but ‘when the Compiler found how many well-read persons were unable to name the author of even the most familiar passage’, she felt the need to provide a volume of these ‘familiar quotations’. Quotations are ‘familiar’ in that strange and slightly coercive sense of being ‘stuff that ...”

“... doorstep. With Pickard’s encouragement, Bunting was tied into the writing scene in Newcastle (he read several times at the newly opened Morden Tower), he found publishers for some of his old poems, and even began writing again. His long poem Briggflatts was written on a commuter train; the last of his ‘sonatas’ (it’s only twenty pages), it was cut down ...”

“... Faustus, Adrian Leverkühn’s music is clearly based on Schönberg’s 12-tone compositions. Alma read the book and immediately told Schönberg she was very upset at the way Mann had appropriated his music. She then rang Mann and told him that Schönberg was angry about the misuse of his ‘intellectual property’ – thanks to Alma, he now was. She went ...”