“... is far less important than some have insisted. The Jefferson of the Declaration was, in fact, a close disciple of the Scottish Enlightenment, influenced by Reid, Smith, Hume, and above all by Francis Hutcheson. This conclusion emerges from what is presented as a study of Jefferson’s reading and writing joined to a detailed analysis of the 18th-century ...”

“... from the forgers themselves, are the press barons and their editors: Henry Nannen, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Giles and Charles Douglas-Home. That Trevor-Roper should have ‘taken the bona fides of the editor’ – of Stern – ‘as a datum’ passes belief. Probably he has never read the magazine. However, journalists, excluding proprietors, generally have a ...”

“... satellite of the metropolis, redeemed if at all as the birth-place of its other famous son, Frank Sinatra. Kinsey’s family were devoutly Methodist, his father an organiser of the Inter-Church Civic League, an organisation formed to monitor the closing time of saloons. No swearing, drinking, dancing or masturbation. A loner, young Alfred found some ...”

“... to it, and the energy of illusions. But How I Grew leaves us on the cold hillside. It is, to be frank, more than a little boring, like having tea with an elderly lady who holds you with her glittering eye while going on and on about her misspent youth. Boasting about it, in fact – but in a mumbling sort of way, dense with references to Maddies and Dotties ...”

“... sunny day when he was still on the sunny side of 50. His biographer exposes this engagingly frank first sentence as false: we are being nudged towards Brulard’s preferred self-image. Meanwhile, as our passion for unexpurgated details about our heroes intensified, another motive for autobiography emerged: the pre-emptive strike against would-be ...”

“... simpler to build there. Everyday facilities of shopping and schooling are generally available close by, while jobs are not too far away (since the 1950s more than half of American industry has been sited outside old city centres). All this, say sprawl’s opponents, comes at an unaffordable expense in infrastructure, and destroys land which has vital ...”

“... as artlessness, so this abundance of autobiographical detail can easily be mistaken for frank comprehensiveness. ‘His biographers are saved the search for significance,’ G.D.H. Cole declared: ‘he has it all ready for them.’ Only close reading reveals that Cobbett hardly ever mentioned his mother. Or that ...”

“... Although often assigned on grounds of his subject-matter to the naturalist tradition of Dreiser, Frank Norris, Jack London, James T. Farrell and Wright, Algren departs from these writers in his prose; Malcolm Cowley called him a ‘poet of the Chicago slums’. All Algren’s losers have tales to tell, flights of fancy that fail to get them out of ...”

“... Party as a whole. Their admirers believe they have an ‘ethos’ and an academic discipline close to those of the grammar schools. They are popular with many middle-class parents, who often get religion when they start thinking about their children’s education. But faith schools are inherently divisive: that is their function. And their admissions ...”

“... didn’t come to a stop, which was surprising: the Reformation and the Enlightenment combined to close down (almost) indulgences and remission of sins, but the liveliness of the dead in their claims on us and their presence in the world didn’t dim.Secularism, reason, scepticism don’t bring disenchantment, Thomas Laqueur argues in this monumental ...”

“... interpretative ends. The literary text, for Riffaterre, is an object of patient and erudite close-reading, a ‘monument’ whose utterly distinctive character the critic sets out to describe and explain. At bottom, there is not much difference between this kind of ‘structuralist’ activity and the techniques of verbal analysis perfected by ...”

“... Knowing they would be appearing under lights, and might be viewed ‘close-up’ by a partner, they took pains over their appearance: some dipped their bras in sugar water to stiffen them; one woman remembered cycling to a dance standing all the way so as not to crease her hand-stitched skirt. The most eloquent testimony comes ...”

“... Lee Harvey Oswald, who looked nothing like the potential presidential assassins played by Frank Sinatra (in Suddenly) or Laurence Harvey (in The Manchurian Candidate), slid ticketless into the Texas Theatre in Dallas, for a double bill that would otherwise have drifted beyond record: Cry of Battle, set in the Philippines, and War is Hell!, a Korean ...”

“... Her interpretive commentary is insightful but not overdetermining: it runs sympathetically close alongside her quotations of her subjects’ own expression of themselves. Leopardi for instance, was worn out – too blind to work, too exhausted and discouraged to see anyone, or to bolster up his courage by any fine attitude. ‘I am tired of life,’ he ...”

“... to wait for my father to answer ... he joyfully hastened to tell us that soon ... he would be a close neighbour of ours, in the Schwarzspanier Haus ... My father seldom got a chance to put a word in. The composer is suddenly there before us in all his garrulousness and good cheer. But who imagines Beethoven as garrulous? The poignancy of the situation ...”