“... reputation, but it was not until the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 – at the close of the Age of Aquarius, did we but know it – that he attained the worldwide renown, or infamy, as some might say, which he continues to enjoy and, if we are to believe The Anatomy Lesson and The Counterlife, to chafe under. Portnoy’s Complaint was the ...”

“... on the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace, published soon after Reagan became President, Frank Raven, an NSA official, is asked what happens when someone on whom the NSA is spying enters the US. ‘You have intelligence which is entirely foreign and you have intelligence which is entirely domestic,’ Raven says. ‘But then you have the third ...”

“... poem he ever published, ‘Salute’, written in 1951 shortly after he’d come under the spell of Frank O’Hara (of whom he later wrote: ‘So witty, so sad,/so you: even your lines have/a broken nose’). ‘Salute’ runs:Past is past, and if oneremembers what one meantto do and never did, isnot to have thought to doenough? Like that gather-ing of one of ...”

“... can be thus summarily wished away in the interests of an uncluttered critical praxis. Frank Kermode’s Essays on Fiction are likewise preoccupied with the relationship between criticism and its broader institutional context. That he construes the relationship in very different terms is a measure of its deep ambivalence as regards the politics of ...”

“... Goodere, Bart. The reiterated claim of genuineness trumps various competitors with his close family connection to the case. Foote’s theatrical career began under the tutelage of the veteran Irish actor and director Charles Macklin. Somewhat improbably, his first outing, in early 1744, was in the role of Othello. This was received well enough but ...”

“... run, Arbus became interested in the connections she could make, the seductions. She liked getting close to those she photographed. She wanted her own unsparing gaze to find a gaze returned. She wanted people to welcome her advances, to note her energy and give it back to her. She wasn’t interested in suffering or pain, or victims of accidents or ...”

“... and unsentimentally. There can seem to be no problem. In ‘Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s’ Frank O’Hara writes that The poem goes on too long because our friendship has been long. In the context of poetry and longevity friendship seems to take a quite natural place at the civilised table. Mention of ‘friendship’, that is. What about John ...”

“... affectionate, and all life-long.’ What of that first impetuous excursion to Delphi with young Frank Lushington, when the happy pair decked their hats and horses with wild flowers? ‘I do not think the key to this is precisely sexual attraction, but the spring in Greece at full blast,’ says Levi, in the spirit of Honi soit. The diaries of that period ...”

“... the superior authenticity of the voice on the spot, but the overall picture you get is a blur of close-ups. Juliet Gardiner had written very well on social conditions in wartime Britain, and on the changes brought about in the country by the huge scale of the American occupation. I remember American cities, lavishly equipped for the GIs’ comfort and ...”

“... within, and not inferior examples of, the tradition which includes Dubliners and the stories of Frank O’Connor. They unsettle one’s sense of period by suggesting (no doubt correctly) that there are hidden tribes close to home practising rites and obeying taboos which have dropped below the horizon of fictional ...”

“... fragment of the Ottoman Empire is the Greek Orthodox Church.’ Dinner with Persephone pays close attention to the everyday objects which appear in Greek dreams and to the interpretations these dreams receive in books and in ordinary life (the women of Mani, in the Peloponnese, are reputed to be the best dream interpreters). Among others, Storace cites ...”

“... who was allowed to flee the country after being involved in a male brothel scandal, and a close friend of his Cambridge tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who fasted to death in an asylum after Eddy died. Is that all the scandal, then? Well no, not quite. Eddy died in 1892 only weeks after he became engaged to Princess May (as ...”

“... Gordale Scar with the whole range of studies and drawings for that picture (unluckily, too close to megalomania to be taken seriously as the masterpiece which, as a painterly performance, it undoubtedly was) revealed how much of the natural thing-in-itself was still within reach of Rubenist style in the 19th century. The studies and drawings of Gordale ...”

“... own style of thought, and instilled these principles into them to the extent that they could be frank and free and democratic with him and one another. The morale of this élite scientific group can still be detected as a positive force in Russian science. Nevertheless, he was damnably intolerant. A first impression of ‘pathology’, in an idea or a ...”

“... little essays are an admirable reminder that the RSC’s standards have always been based on a close study of the words. David Suchet convincingly shows that his human rather than fishy, black but not monstrous Caliban was a perfectly logical reading, in defiance of grand and inhuman Calibans stretching back to Beerbohm Tree, who, taking his name too ...”