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“... selected from texts in some nine different languages, ranging from Homer and the Old Testament to Virginia Woolf, it assumes throughout that reality has an objective existence, is open to perception, and needs no apologetic inverted commas. It can be and enduringly is represented by writers whose work bears the impress not only of their own individuality but ...”

“... faded. Vengeance is represented here by Judit Torre, a mysterious beauty known as the ‘Chilean Virginia Woolf’, who is the leader of a group of female terrorists bent on killing a member of the security police. Mañungo falls under Judit’s spell and finds himself, within hours of his return, joining the scavengers and thugs lurking in the streets of a ...”

“... the summer of 1862, when a seemingly imminent Union victory was arrested both in the West and in Virginia. It may be remarked here, hardly parenthetically, that the prolongation of the war by these Southern successes ensured that the war would turn into a crusade against slavery. An early victory would have restored the Union without any immediate prospect ...”

“... astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the meantime, Robert Dallek scooped him with Lyndon Johnson and His Times in two thick volumes ...”

“... to go weak at the knees where men of action, and particularly soldiers, are concerned. If Dr Johnson was right that every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, then imagine the havoc the idea plays with book reviewing types, who spend whole days on the sofa and call it work. At any rate, the reaction to The Yellow Birds – the ...”

“... one. Sputnik provoked a frenzy among the American political establishment. In January 1958, Lyndon Johnson, then Senate majority leader, convened a series of hearings that occupied the front pages of newspapers every day. The first hydrogen bomb test had taken place five years earlier. ‘But there is something more important than any ultimate weapon,’ ...”

“... perceived by traditional Republican leaders as a subversive takeover by their social inferiors. In Virginia, for example, the new Family Values leaders (who supported Oliver North) were not even on speaking terms with traditional Republican leaders (exemplified by the much-married Senator Warner, former husband of Elizabeth Taylor). Under a multi-party ...”

“... to North America; the ‘second middle passage’ that uprooted slaves from older states such as Virginia and brought them to the cotton kingdom of the Lower South; and the arrival in the last quarter-century of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Africa). Population movements have been a defining feature of African-American life.The fact ...”

“... Times and the Spectator. Carey’s cousins in populism sometimes include Simon Jenkins, Paul Johnson, A.N. Wilson and the late Auberon Waugh. An easy moralism animates this worldview. Picasso was a pig; Edmund Gosse was ‘a bore’; D.H. Lawrence hit Frieda and wanted to exterm-inate whole races; Virginia Woolf was a ...”

“... enough,’ Oliver Wendell Holmes said in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, which allowed the state of Virginia to sterilise a poor white girl called Carrie Buck, whose mother was in a mental hospital. The policy was based on the belief that mental illness and various forms of deviancy were inheritable; it doesn’t, of course, follow from this view that forced ...”

“... was his notorious response to hearing Shakespeare praised for never having blotted a line). Samuel Johnson catches Shakespeare ‘entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject; he struggles with it for a while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it in words such as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled by those ...”

“... Ever since Samuel Johnson’s icy comment of 1775 – ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ – British observers have felt a little sour about the American Revolution. For Tories like Johnson, the colonists were ungrateful wretches who had squandered the precious gift of British liberty ...”

“... but was determined to support herself by writing. In this she was helped by the publisher Joseph Johnson, whose three o’clock salons – known as ‘a Menagerie of Live Authors’ – introduced her to the work of Thomas Paine, William Blake, Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley. Johnson taught her to ...”

“... as the archetypal Delta bluesman, a precursor to Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James and Robert Johnson: vagrants, rounders, always on the move – pursued, as Handy put it, by ‘suffering and hard luck’, conceiving their music ‘in aching hearts’. Hari Kunzru’s new novel is, among other things, a fictional meditation on the figure of the ...”

“... single-author studies. They do not sell, unlike postcolonial anthologies and bluffer’s guides to Virginia Woolf. In the prelapsarian 1960s, a typical critical essay might be entitled ‘Window Imagery in the Later Pasternak’, while in the theoretico-political 1970s, ‘Class Struggle in The Divine Comedy’ was a more predictable topic. By the 1980s and ...”