“... conceived in liberty is always an intellectual act for Lincoln,’ Wills writes – the italics mark the wish to overcome a violence that he never quite acknowledges as the necessary condition for the rebirth. Bringing new life to a text one would have thought had been exhausted by interpretation, Wills anatomises Lincoln’s self-aware magic with ...”

“... deal to further the careers of two young writers who became his closest friends, Henry James and Mark Twain. He published much of their early fiction and reviewed them in other magazines. He opened the Atlantic to Southern writers in the aftermath of the Civil War; and at Harper’s, where his power was even greater if less direct, he promoted women ...”

“... York in 2008 after it was revealed that he was using a call-girl when he went to Washington, or Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, who got into trouble when his aides discovered that he was really visiting a divorcée in Buenos Aires when he said he was hiking in the Appalachians – a lot of people say that it’s not the cheating or the fornication ...”

“... something to Steinbeck. At a few blessed moments, however, there are some lighter reminiscences of Mark Twain:   My daddy run off from home when he was 15. Otherwise I’d of been born in Alabama.   You wouldnt of been born at all ...   I dont see why you say that. I’d of been born somewheres.   How?   Well why not?   If your mama ...”

“... the Greek had said the same thing of semitic Carthage two thousand years ago.’ By contrast, when Mark Twain came visiting, he fell ill, stayed in his hotel for 11 days and left Chicago without seeing the fair. Maybe it was all too refined for him. Not that Burnham and his colleagues expected or wanted to refine American robustness and ingenuity out of ...”

“... remembers with more than a twinge of conscience that he and his colleagues found the challenge to Mark Twain’s great novel offensive because it violated ‘academic norms of objectivity’. Anyone teaching literature and writing criticism nowadays knows that the appeal to objectivity will no longer do. Indeed, any such appeal may even be suspected ...”

“... with the scene at Forest Lawn’ came ‘The Anglo-American impasse. Never the twain shall meet.’ Not a new thought even thirty years ago, but, though we may run into one another occasionally in the corridors of the Humanity Research Center of the University of Texas (their territory), or share a train compartment on the way to Combe ...”

“... in London, on the board of the New Left Review. It was definitely a funny story, but told with a Mark Twain, Yankee at the Court of King Arthur generosity. And of course I understood his laughter at my love of the Southland. I had the feeling that somewhere in the back of his mind, listening to me, was the memory of a scene in a movie called Model ...”

“... born in the 1830 and 1840s: Bret Harte, Artemus Ward, Joel Chandler Harris and, lion among them, Mark Twain. With O. Henry, born a decade later, we are already moving out of the oral tradition, with its loose-limbed jogtrot rhythms and its shameless delight in red herrings and shaggy dogs, its weakness for pratfalls and confidence tricks, and beginning ...”

“... film scripts that had gone wooden. To be a journalist meant, as it did for Defoe, Dickens and Mark Twain, going for the salient external markers of a human dilemma, ‘telling a story’, getting your copy in on time, and becoming accustomed to living by your writing without fellowships or chairs of creative writing. To break with the New Yorker ...”

“... with the Wind and Dallas, both hugely popular dynastic stories, were largely about Southern clans. Mark Twain had a theory about that: he said the fondness for clans was a consequence of a Southern addiction to Walter Scott. He was only half-joking when he said that Scott’s heroic clans, and their readiness for battle, were responsible for the Civil ...”

“... a terrible relentlessness about Thatcher’s Fortunes, a chronicle that can be easily summed up. Mark Thatcher, talentless, and so graceless that the most charming thing about him was that he would sometimes introduce himself as ‘charmless Mark’, was – is – doted on by ‘Mummy’, in whose eyes he could do no ...”

“... very end his attempt ‘to follow the young men to their crosses’, the cement markers put up to mark the places of their deaths, although he anticipates it early in the book: If a storyteller thinks enough of storytelling to regard it as a calling, unlike a historian he cannot turn from the suffering of his characters. A storyteller, unlike a ...”

“... three quotations that stand as epigraph to this book are from Büchner, the Goncourt brothers and Mark Twain, taking over the baton from Byron, Tchaikovsky and Flaubert in the previous volume. How far the thinking, writing, chattering, teaching and preaching classes who dominate the scene spoke for or to their less intellectual and vocal fellows ...”

“... W.B. Yeats. He knew both Henry James and Tennessee Williams, patronised Masefield and Ezra Pound. Mark Twain wrote a poem about him ... Altogether, Witter Bynner seems too large a person to be discussed merely as an appendage of D.H. Lawrence. This collection of letters (selected from more than seven thousand) represents the fifth volume of Bynner’s ...”