“... a cartoon version of what Philip Roth called ‘the indigenous American berserk’. The hero of J. Robert Lennon’s fourth novel is a postal carrier, a loner in late middle age, moderately disgruntled, deranged to an uncertain extent – raising concerns that he will storm his place of work with a shotgun before the novel is through. But Albert Lippincott ...”

“... them, it has to be said, lived all that easy a life (even if a good few of the difficulties were self-inflicted, no burden feels lighter because of that). Perhaps the obvious explanation as to why these brilliant men were so bored is the simplest one: life, for them, was boring. Life was changing in ways which made it less boring to be an upper-middle-class ...”

“... helped by the untimely publication of his ditto. Graham Greenes (d. 1991) are on the way down, Robert Lowells (d. 1977, with the Collected Poems coming next year) are a good buy; stock in Anthony Burgess (d. 1993) should probably be held for a year or two; Borgeses (d. 1986) will surge once the editing and republishing are sorted out; James Merrills ...”

“... time he went at the age of 18 to Vanderbilt and attracted the attention of John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren it was glory all the way until he enlisted in the services a decade later. When in 1934 Allen Tate put together a poetry supplement for a magazine, it included several poets with firm reputations, but was headed by five poems from a ...”

“... literary event. Indeed, it was a literary event in a good many different, though related ways. As Robert Darnton has emphasised, it was a literary event in that it unlocked the printing presses and called forth a torrent of newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and essays. Where France possessed no uncensored newspapers before 1789, almost two hundred journals ...”

“... supply a good deal to trim the balance. It is a mistaken though still lingering idea, Robert Sykes writes, that Chartism and trade-unionism had only marginal connections: they were in close touch in Lancashire throughout the early Chartist years. Chartists there were workers as well, a cross-section of ‘skilled but insecure artisans and factory ...”

“... the knife back, wanted only to cut him loose, to free him, to divide up his ‘stubborn mono-self’ into its original constituents. Yehuda dodged the blow, so that Naomi neither killed him nor freed him from himself, but merely grazed him with the knife, inscribing on his chest a lasting scar, ‘a hooked line like a reddish beak’. Two years later, as ...”

“... than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie’s: ‘Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb – Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan’, etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind. A good half of the book is pictorial ...”

“... At the beginning of Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities a well-dressed couple arrives at the scene of an accident on a busy street in Vienna. The lady is uncomfortable, ‘had a disagreeable sensation in the pit of her stomach, which she felt entitled to take for compassion’. The man, after a pause, says: ‘These heavy lorries they use here have too long a braking-distance ...”

“... heart into the earth, so it would grow. This touch of melodrama is complicated by Glück’s self-awareness about her ‘dark nature’, as in ‘“Parodos”’: I was born to a vocation: to bear witness to the great mysteries. Now that I’ve seen both birth and death, I know to the dark nature these are proofs, not mysteries – Glück likes the ...”

“... of James’s philosophical practice are caught in this swift picture. I take these quotations from Robert Richardson’s William James, the most recent in a long run of biographies. Its predecessors were by Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Gay Wilson Allen (1967) and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James ...”

“... sort of thinking for years but has finally succumbed to it in collaboration with his MIT colleague Robert Berwick, producing Why Only Us: Language and Evolution. Identifying the earliest known symbolic object, a geometrically engraved plaque from South Africa dating from eighty thousand years ago, the authors infer that it indicates the emergence of the human ...”

“... an aging prodigy, the Mozart of celluloid, putting himself and his troupe through the hoops with self-conscious bravado. He irradiated the entire project with a glancing mockery that might have reminded a bookish provincial lad of Don Juan or the Dunciad, but of nothing he had previously encountered, or expected, in the cinema. At least where I lived, these ...”

“... vapidities of the Greenwich Dome – a Festival of Britain manqué – to reveal that such self-confidence has dissolved. Our ‘crisis’ of national identity has become an old friend. It’s 25 years since Tom Nairn first willed the ‘Break-Up of Britain’, and ten since Linda Colley influentially explained that Britons were the product of ...”

“... is hard to uproot. Beverly Treasure? Chelsea Herbert? Lloriston Grant? Caroline Blackwood and Robert Lowell have a conversation about Ford Madox Ford? (Well, all right, but what’s it doing among ‘Traveller’s Tales’?)Chelsea Herbert is real too, and writes the best piece in the ‘Children in the City’ section: a funny, simple, and probably ...”