“... relatively indifferent to the sex of the authors she’s dealing with. But in Eagleton-eyed Peter Gibbons, who wrote the chapter on non-fiction, Sturm found someone in tune with his editorial song. ‘Writing,’ Gibbons tells us, ‘like Marx’s capital, arrives in New Zealand “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and ...”

“... at the hands of the Courtenays in 1455. And if one Lancastrian knight of the shire, Sir Peter Bessels of Berkshire, took the then highly unusual initiative of sponsoring a new monastic college at Oxford, the heretical religious interests of Sir John Oldcastle led to his being burned while hanging (presumably still alive) in St Giles’s Fields in ...”

“... to such earlier romance memoirs and traveller’s tales as Robert Paltock’s The Adventures of Peter Wilkins, the memoirs of the Comtesse d’Aulnoy and the better-known Moll Flanders and Tristram Shandy. But Saunders’s readings lucidly reveal the origins of the continuing, ever growing eagerness of audiences to feel that what they are experiencing has ...”

“... reasons. The exposé conducted by Channel 4 News, with the support of the Observer and the New York Times, captured the now suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, bragging to someone he believed was a potential client that he’d met Trump ‘many times’ and master-minded the entire Trump campaign strategy. Nix implies that those forty ...”

“... it away. The Stainton Missal is a small folio, printed in Paris in 1516, which survives today in York Minster Library. At some point in the mid-16th century, its pages were violently cut: a diagonal slice at the opening of the Te igitur – the first prayer of the canon of the Mass, illustrated with a woodcut image of the Crucifixion hand-coloured in ...”

“... on the cronyism and political corruption the files reveal, and in the UK on the misdeeds of Peter Mandelson. Only Anand Giridharadas, appearing on the Ezra Klein Show, appeared to have read Virginia Giuffre’s book. The men she was dispatched to have sex with, Giuffre wrote, might have been rich and powerful, but they were awkward, socially immature ...”

“... into close relations with Hugh Gaitskell. It would be unkind as well as inaccurate to call him the Peter Mandelson of the Gaitskell years, not least because, unlike Mandelson, he had established constituency roots before he began and also because, unlike Mandelson, he had rather little impact on the actual presentation of the Party’s policies, which remained ...”

“... was typical of commercial and financial oligarchies from 17th-century London to 20th-century New York. The second emphasises the pastoral role of the state and its duty to create social harmony and exalt hierarchy through ‘a well-ordered public space and beneficent, universal public power’. These ideas had their origins in absolutism; they resurfaced in ...”

“... seine fishermen of Long Island whose way of life was being extinguished in the mid-1980s, just as Peter Matthiessen was at work on his account of it? ‘These doggedly independent men,’ he tells us, ‘do not speak of themselves as “working”, far less “taking a job”.’ He quotes one of the younger generation: ‘Fishin wasn’t a job, it was your ...”

“... At the age of 71, in 1943, he told a version of the same story to the writer Ella Winter in New York, bringing out pictures of chrysanthemums and trees, ‘old pencil and ink drawings of decades ago’, to demonstrate how far he had come. In the essays he wrote about the theoretical underpinnings of his art and its place in modern culture, he made it seem ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third ...”

“... departed hand in hand; I had been reading too much John Hoyer Updike. In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly ...”

“... editions by New Directions and never exhibited on a bookstore counter.’ When he returned to New York, Williams told a friend: ‘It wasn’t the Arabs I was afraid of while I was in Tangier; it was Paul Bowles, whose chilling stories filled me with horror.’ ‘The Delicate Prey’ was published in Tangier a few weeks after it was written, in a magazine ...”

“... wanted the voice. After the Bon Soir there were gigs in nightclubs in Detroit, St Louis and New York, as well as her first television appearance. She dropped the middle ‘a’ from ‘Barbara’.The praise was endless. Marty Erlichman, who would become her agent, saw her perform at the Bon Soir and came to see her backstage. ‘I have the feeling you’re ...”