“... This makes it a maddening book to read, and only someone who knows the biographies of Welles by Charles Higham, Simon Callow and others is likely to guess what Conrad is up to and why. Yet he is also writing criticism. Here the difference should matter between a line written as a writer writes and a line spoken as an actor reads. Even in a study like this ...”

“... Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Their music embodied the promise of another country, one that was true to its professed ideals. Its very existence seemed miraculous. A vernacular music, created by the descendants of slaves, had ...”

“... heard in the word ‘Norton’ an echo of that job, and even of his family – he was appointed as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. From childhood onwards, Eliot was fascinated not just by names in general, but by his own. Murder in the Cathedral, the 1935 play which, throughout the period covered by this volume of letters, yields a healthy income ...”

“... year Swift published an extract from McGahern’s unpublished first novel. It was spotted by Charles Monteith at Faber, who went on to oversee the publication of many of McGahern’s books. When Swift read the first part of another novel – to be called The Barracks – he wrote: ‘It’s a real advance. Very exciting. I still think the first book ...”

“... reality, brought to the heart of European cities or visited on Korea, Cambodia or Vietnam. In 1869 Charles Dilke wrote that ‘the gradual extinction of the inferior races is not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind,’ and with ghoulish eugenist fervour praised Anglo-Saxons as ‘the only extirpating race on earth’. Bombing was first thought of ...”

“... Charles Taylor​ has had a long, fêted career as a philosopher with a particular interest in bringing the French and German traditions into productive conversation with their Anglo-American counterparts, and in bringing political and ethical theorising to bear on contemporary politics both in the UK and in his country of birth, Canada: he was an active participant in the British New Left, and stood more than once as a New Democratic Party candidate for the Canadian parliament ...”

“... cross the Polar region over into Siberia, and hit the Stony Tunguska instead. Reading this passage in the spirit of Bernard Carlson’s assiduous, endlessly patient biography, we might respond in two ways. Taking the claim at face value, we could list the many good reasons why Tesla couldn’t possibly have caused the Tunguska Event (now thought to ...”

“... to search and whom to apprehend – it was to the chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas, Sir Charles Pratt, not to Mansfield’s court, that Wilkes’s lawyers applied for a writ of habeas corpus. Mansfield, who despised Pratt (a good lawyer with a liberal track record at the bar), was angry that his court was being bypassed; but by the time the law ...”

“... in this nation since slavery’, declaring it to be, in fact, ‘slavery in a way’, because its passage was part of a larger Leninist push to impose communism on America. He said that if people want to know the truth about President Obama, they should simply ‘read Mein Kampf’ and the works of Lenin, and that ‘if there were no Fox News and if there was ...”

“... or much maligned royal statesman?’ Brooke’s near hagiography has a foreword by Prince Charles, whom he befriended in the Royal Archives at Windsor: ‘We both agreed that George III had been unfairly maligned by historians and the writers of textbook history.’ More recently, shorter lives by Christopher Wright (2005) and Jeremy Black (2020; an ...”

“... work in European literature, both parts written in the shadow of the Inquisition. In another passage, Cervantes gives Sancho some lines whose reference to the expulsion of the Muslims and Jews is unmistakeable: ‘I’d like your grace to tell me why is it that Spaniards, when they’re about to go into battle, invoke St James the Moor-Slayer and ...”

“... a man who manages to appear the supreme egotist, while seeking a kind of extinction of the ego. A passage in the unfinished novel Cécile – which recounts under the thinnest fictional veneer the story of Constant and Charlotte – is remarkably suggestive. The narrator and Cécile rendezvous at the Bal de l’Opéra where, both wearing masks, they stay till ...”

“... but also a historically-determined direction: that of the Soviet revolutionary struggle. The passage of time diminished the appropriateness of the original direction, and in 1932 Eisenstein, having out-stayed his leave of absence trying to make Que viva Mexico!, found disfavour in the eyes of Russia’s most powerful viewer, Stalin. This was a ...”

“... he was a born academic, absorbed in his armchair analysis of morals and social institutions, and Charles Lamb got his temperament right when he dubbed him ‘the Professor’. The book which made him, Political Justice (1793), was certainly not meant to emulate Tom Paine’s Rights of Man in whipping up the political passions of the man in the street. It was ...”

“... as a boy he met Dickens in Victoria Park, Hackney and talked about authorship to him. There is a passage on these lines in Paul Kelver. But Jerome was not the only public figure to boast of such an encounter (see Coulson Kernahan’s introduction to Moss’s life). Jerome’s works are as treacherous a guide to reality as the travels of Perelman. The ...”