“... asked ‘whether a love of poverty helped’ him ‘use other eyes, like those of that sightless stone’. Whether he’s condemned here for not loving poverty – that is, for not being poor (as, in one account at least, Homer supposedly was) – or for wanting St Lucians to remain poor rather than grow wealthy from the tourists, is not made clear, and the ...”

“... scarce at different times. Thus a loaf of bread in its turn is, as the Gospel says, not like a stone. But at each stage in the process of distinction some sort of contrast of form and matter must be acknowledged. Those who would annexe all for form (or discourse, or ‘text’) are, as it were, constitutionally obliged to ignore the contrast. The drama of ...”

“... it produces obstacles to expression. Then he treats the chosen rules as if they were set in stone, beyond appeal. The supreme example of formalist procedure must be the fugue in music. Once you have decided to write a fugue, your choice of theme is already restricted by the permutations that will be required. A loose fugue is no fugue at all. Once ...”

“... manufactured by Dow in large quantities and then deployed in the firebombings of Berlin and Tokyo. Robert Neer, a historian of napalm, quotes a Japanese medical professor describing the carnage: ‘There was no one to rescue. If you touched one of the roasted bodies, the flesh would crumble in your hand. Humanity was reduced to its chemical properties, turned ...”

“... the city, wheeling her around to focus on unexpected views and details: ‘the texture of old stone, a batch of secondhand bathtubs for sale on a sidewalk, the juxtaposition of several buildings’. Though often thought of as a social critic (because of his collaboration with James Agee in 1941 on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), Evans, too, distrusted ...”

“... only other living French novelist I would compare with her as a source of intelligent pleasure, Robert Pinget.) She went about literature slowly once she had taken to it. Tropisms, her first book, was not published until 1939, seven years after she began writing it. It is a sparse but mordant collection of short scenes of social exchange whose ordinariness ...”

“... number of Hogg’s other novels and stories, including the most famous of all. The first victim of Robert Wringhim the justified sinner, and his diabolical shadow Gil-Martin, is a minister who sits up when shot; and when Wringhim’s own body comes to be buried, it has stiffened into a sitting posture, so that one of the burial party, in a passage expunged in ...”

“... People sometimes saw her on the street, giving her money away to strangers or sitting on a stone bench in Grace Plaza, feeding the pigeons, but after a time she disappeared. She spent the rest of her life in and out of halfway houses and hospitals and died of heart failure in a nursing home in the Rockaways, four years ago this month.Maeve Brennan was ...”

“... LaRouche, the real ‘existentialist’ honchos on the boardwalk aren’t Adorno or Arendt, but Robert McNamara and the Kilgorean figure of William Westmoreland. This volume bears little sign of the bourgeois deviationism to which Marcuse fell prey in the Forties, though it may be coming in one of the promised sequels. These were, after all, the years when ...”

“... in wide lyrical links: Platonic England, house of solitudes, rests in its laurels and its injured stone, replete with complex fortunes that are gone, beset by dynasties of moods and clouds. Alas, neither the tone nor the metre of the new poems has that bosomy largesse. Instead, Hill is angry, frothing with laus et vituperatio – vituperatio, above ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... and systematically, while no one is leading anyone here. I assume that Crowe, a former Rolling Stone reporter, and the writer-director of Say Anything, Singles and Jerry Maguire, has edited his taped talks with Wilder, but he has edited them to sound like taped talks. The order of events is their actual order, and on page 131 of the book Crowe and Wilder ...”

“... in the wake of the great debate of the 1940s and 1950s that was dominated by R.H. Tawney, Lawrence Stone, Christopher Hill and Trevor-Roper himself. Its focus was the economic causes of the war. The conflicting hypotheses about the wealth and power of the aristocracy and gentry, about the waning of feudalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie, and about the ...”

“... as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the Tube ...”

“... capitalisation required. It was a serious thing, trying to be a writer. My ex-boyfriend, Robert, had just won a national book contest. When I first saw David, he was kneeling next to Robert’s chair, looking up at him. I thought he looked like a little bird waiting to be fed. But David noticed me in a different ...”