“... infinite length; the next moment, the leg was minuscule, and the ground under my nose. The ground rose, retreated, tilted, torqued. Perceptual illusions succeeded one another at the rate of five or six a second. I thought of Hume – ‘we are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed one another with an inconceivable ...”

“... at least until Peaky Blinders came along? In my experience, nobody, not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he ...”

“... transformed into an oak, a latter-day English Daphne. A few years later, Dryden wrote a letter to Richard Busby, his sons’ headmaster at Westminster, appealing against the rustication of one of them for some misdemeanour. He sugared the protest like this: ‘None complaine, but they desire to be reconcild at the same time: there is no mild Expostulation at ...”

“... solemn dream logic the impasse in the conclave that forces the cardinals to choose as pope George Rose, an expelled seminarian turned scribbler. As Pope Hadrian, he strives for the conversion of England and summons Europe’s crowned heads to avert a world war, before a socialist stabs him to death as he strolls around Rome. Greene, who loved Rolfe’s ...”

“... the Committee’s press conference, when an editor of the official historical journal of the CPSU rose to enquire angrily what right Yanayev had as a member of the Politburo to participate in the unconstitutional takeover, to which the hangdog pretender replied that a Party historian should know that he was not a member of the Politburo. In fact, no one from ...”

“... professor; he had been a friend of Wagner’s and parties in the house were attended by Mahler and Richard Strauss. ‘One has no thought of Jewishness in regard to these people,’ Thomas wrote to his brother, ‘one senses only culture.’ Once married, Thomas and Katia Mann lived in splendour in Munich. ‘The Manns,’ Reich-Ranicki wrote, ‘would go to ...”

“... Young Dead’ and Picasso’s travelling artistes, ‘the Saltimbanques’, of the Elegies; ‘the Rose’, which has its place in his poetry at all times; and ‘the poem’ (‘Gedicht’, ‘Gesang’, ‘Rühmen’) as a vessel and emblem of the creative impulse. These mythic creations culminate in the tenth and last Elegy, in which the figure of ...”

“... Best Writers (2016), Joel Whitney suggested that among those Matthiessen was surveilling was Richard Wright, who was living in Paris after breaking with the Communist Party in 1944.Richardson does not rule out Wright as an initial target, but working from Matthiessen’s unpublished accounts of his CIA work, one of which is called ‘THE PARIS REVIEW ...”

“... except for The Ring and the Book, already edited for the same series, the ‘English Poets’, by Richard Altick; it omits the plays after Pippa passes, but adds poems uncollected by Browning himself, and also, in an appendix, the prose ‘Essay on Shelley’.In his brief but dense and elegant Preface John Pettigrew manages to allude to the difficulties ...”

“... of Les Temps modernes were published, her play, Les Bouches inutiles, was put on, and her stock rose again. She became the literary equivalent of Dior’s New Look, and a tabloid figure: being called ‘la grande Sartreuse’ or ‘Notre-Dame de Sartre’ made her laugh, but she found it ‘repugnant’ to be looked up and down like a ‘dissolute ...”

“... going to ask what you did for money.I used to teach English to foreign students. My landlady, Mrs Rose, had a dynamic, thrusting son, as he thought, anyway; dynamic and thrusting enough to be annoyed that I hadn’t paid the rent for the last six weeks. Without consulting me, he put an ad in the local paper on my behalf saying: ‘Oxford graduate gives ...”

“... the seats filled, and I saw Haire approaching, and with him a man I knew must be Benjamin. I rose to greet them, and after a few friendly words they passed on. I sat down again and resumed my thoughts, to which was now added the satisfaction that Benjamin appeared to me as kindly in person as by letter. And before long I should know the truth. I might ...”

“... the ones that penetrated the hull, were by intellectual formidables such as the critic and editor Richard Poirier, who methodically dismantled Bellow in this paper (after a patronising observation from Atlas about Bellow’s unsure footing when he ventures into ‘the realm of ideas’, Poirier dryly commented: ‘Atlas himself occasionally ventures into the ...”

“... and Chicago. In 1919, Gertrude married David Nemerov, a window-dresser in the main store who rose to become president of the company. Howard was born in 1920, Diane in 1923 and their sister Renée in 1929. The work that their father put in at the department store, Lubow writes, ‘took place mostly out of the children’s view’. But ‘the attention ...”

“... of the modernist canon. Protective of its cub, Partisan Review runs a judicious appreciation by Richard Poirier (one of Mailer’s early academic champions), but no chorus rises to proclaim Podhoretz the bold young successor to Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Stanley Edgar Hyman and Mary McCarthy in the Quality Lit Crit Biz. He is needled as a ...”