“... that’s not the whole story, or indeed the most interesting part of it. In Chapter 13 comes the passage I have already mentioned, in which Connie, having dined with her husband and roundly condemned him in her own mind as a dead fish of a gentleman with a celluloid soul, puts on ‘rubber tennis-shoes, and then a light coat’, and slips out of the house to ...”

“... of America are located in the writings, in turn, of Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens (gathered in Chapter Two under the heading ‘Institutional America’), Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke (‘Aesthetic America’), Kipling and R.L. Stevenson (‘Epic (and Chivalric) America’), H.G. Wells (‘Futuristic America’), D.H. Lawrence ...”

“... object or occasion. Not that we don’t enjoy some of these essays, especially time-honoured ones: Charles Lamb on Shakespeare’s plays in relation to their stage representation is as delicious as it is dated. Yet unlike Lamb’s piece, the contemporary critical essay often demands a knowledge that is highly specialised, and uses a vocabulary drawn from ...”

“... this sense of an unbudging, implacable destructiveness that makes me anxious. It brings back a passage in Maurice Leitch’s Liberty Lad, a novel set in Co Antrim which I first read in 1974, the year the Power-Sharing Executive was brought down: ‘the old deadly derision, the curse which we all are born with in this cold cynical northern province’. And ...”

“... companion of the Princess Ghika at the Villa Gamberaia up in Settignano. The philosopher, Charles Strong, his college mate, who had married a Rockefeller daughter, showed up.’ It’s like watching the suitcases rotate in an international airport. Miss Blood comes round again a hundred pages and a half a dozen years later, writing to Gertrude Stein ...”

“... more to discrediting a feeble pseudo-Jacobean pamphlet published forty years earlier by the actor Charles Macklin. Compared to his later tour de force in this line, however, these are mere squibs. When Samuel Ireland, unwitting dupe of his 19-year-old son William Henry, published Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William ...”

“... that it derives directly from an abridged version of the novel prepared by the London bookseller Charles Cooke in 1811. Cooke, or his hack, went through the ‘eighth’ edition rewriting phrases that appeared too colloquial or idiomatic and simplifying sentences that rambled or changed direction. He deleted notionally superfluous words and phrases ...”

“... on his own, magically, at precisely the words that Cervantes uses. Borges’s narrator quotes a passage from Cervantes, followed by one from Menard. The quotations are ‘verbally identical’, and the sight of them on the page is already funny and disturbing enough, but Borges’s finest touch is more discreet, and truly dizzying. Having commented on the ...”

“... for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s publisher, John Martin of the Black Sparrow Press, set about reprinting Fante’s books. Bukowski, who had been devoted to both books ‘like a man who had found gold in the city ...”

“... present edition of his letters more than bears him out. Horne calls attention to a characteristic passage from one of the letters to Ward quoted earlier, in which James finds himself irresistibly drawn forward by all he wants to convey: But there is too much to say about these things – & I am writing too much – & yet haven’t said ½ I want to ...”

“... his writings he could be eloquent about man’s desolation in an indifferent universe. The famous passage in his Foundations of Belief still makes you shiver: Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a ...”

“... being served. The Quarto text sounds like Stephen Rea, the modernised one like Gielgud or Prince Charles. The same or very similar modernised texts in Katherine Duncan-Jones’s scholarly and accessible new edition seem perfectly presentable on their own, but in Vendler are often destabilised by their immediate adjacency to the Quarto texts. Duncan-Jones ...”

“... if everyone is trying to become the worst possible version of themselves. Here are Eugene Landy, Charles Manson, Phil Spector, Murry Wilson. Then there are the scarcely believable transformations of the boy-child Brian Wilson. How did he jump through the hula hoops of novelty pop to arrive, in the blink of an ‘I’, at a place where it seemed perfectly ...”

“... of myth by forgotten streams … Had he not moved unseen when darkness covered the waters?’ The passage is wonderfully facetious, but at the same time it manages momentarily to smuggle into this remorseless world, by the duplicity of a joke, just the sort of transcendent feelings evoked by Rossetti’s pictures.Reviewers were not slow to allocate Waugh’s ...”

“... and apologise to those he’d forgotten to acknowledge. They include Jared Kushner’s father, Charles, now Trump’s ambassador to France. In one hasty passage, Sarkozy remembers to doff his cap to Kushner Sr after politely declining his offer of a visit in prison, which Sarkozy’s lawyers believed might compromise his ...”