“... no one else on the bench. ‘His vision was never unsteadied by scepticism,’ Erich Heller wrote. Walter Benjamin asserted that ‘Kraus never offered an argument that had not engaged his whole person. Thus he embodies the secret of authority: never to disappoint.’ It’s easy to see why unsteady, disappointed people would be attracted to such a figure, but ...”

“... not expect them to provide us with an ‘equivalent of’ their source. We should instead – as Walter Benjamin proposed in his visionary essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ – ask how the imaginative life of the source text has been prolonged, what has been done by the translation, what it points to, throws light on, or mimes. Take the first of two ...”

“... in a long run of biographies. Its predecessors were by Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Gay Wilson Allen (1967) and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James (1980) and in Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club (2001). No lack of attention, then, but Richardson’s book is very welcome, in part because of his ...”

“... and canny: ‘Think slow, act fast,’ he said. Books about him generally reverse that equation. Walter Kerr’s The Silent Clowns (1975) tried to match Keaton’s torrential invention with his own prolix showboating; Rudi Blesh’s Keaton (1966) had the imprimatur of the master as well as his collaboration but no equivalent grace. Both Blesh’s biography ...”

“... his credentials as a mediator who could negotiate what he called (borrowing the phrase from Walter Lippmann, the energetic young editor of the New Republic) a ‘peace without victory’. Later, he would propose a much more unusual and high-minded plan for enduring peace – replacing militarist regimes with democracies – which liberal intellectuals ...”

“... read what everybody was reading,’ Sontag wrote in her most gorgeous pen-portrait, the essay on Walter Benjamin called ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’: she might as well have said it of herself. For Benjamin, this was just part of the charm of his collector’s passion for oddities, a result of his eccentric alternation of lassitude with enthusiasm. One ...”

“... Men. But their tenure was in jeopardy, because the owner of the land on which it stood, Giles Allen, was refusing to extend their lease, which was due to expire in April 1597. It was this imminent threat of eviction which brought Burbage to the Blackfriars in search of alternative accommodation for the company. He paid the owner of the former ...”

“... John Wieners​ once told his nephew he had met the Virgin Mary. ‘Did she say anything to you?’ Walter asked. ‘No,’ John said, ‘she doesn’t know how to speak.’ He paused. ‘But she’s learning.’ Wieners was born to a working-class family outside Boston in 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina ...”

“... a drug memoir called Narcotics: Nicotine, Alcohol, Cocaine, Peyote, Morphine and Ether (1932). Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and Antonin Artaud all gave it a try. In her memoirs Simone de Beauvoir described Sartre being haunted by visions of scuttling crabs for days after his experiment, but Jay writes that Sartre admitted to ...”

“... The WPS was a wartime force that was expected to disband at the Armistice but its commandant, Mary Allen, carried on, despite being arrested in 1921 for wearing police uniform. The CCWO connected women operating in male-dominated professions, providing practical as well as moral support, and Astor and Matheson were equally active on the home front. The League ...”

“... matters, such as whether or not Grant was Jewish, there is no way of setting the record straight. Walter Matthau thought he must be Jewish, even though Grant denied it, because ‘he was so intelligent’, but also because he ‘pronounced the r in “yarmulke”. An Englishman wouldn’t pronounce the r.’ As if Cary Grant’s accent was anything to go ...”

“... Oxonienses, and Sidney Lee who follows Wood in the DNB, Order and Disorder is the work of Sir Allen Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely accessible’, now easily accessible in David Norbrook’s modern spelling edition, offers according to Norbrook ‘a particularly strong corrective to the conventional view that literature after 1660 ...”

“... But choosing New York for the convention was overweening even by Republican standards: like Woody Allen, only less humorously, they wanted the sweep of Manhattan to enlarge a panoply of private concerns, and blinded with tears and outrage, they wanted to forge a kind of unity in commemoration of the disaster. Cynicism is not news in politics: the Republicans ...”

“... editor of the London Magazine. He has written well-received biographies of Cyril Connolly and Allen Lane, and has already published three volumes of autobiography, the last entitled Grub Street Irregular. Now he has written a book which is, the blurb tells us, ‘both a riveting exercise in group biography and a masterly account of English society in the ...”

“... an idea only other people can have. Willard’s mission is to terminate the command of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, a distinguished but now apparently crazy officer who has crossed into Cambodia and, along with a group of fierce and loyal Montagnards, is waging the war on his own terms. Well, not just the colonel’s command. ‘Terminate with extreme ...”