“... 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 ...”

“... written a lively, serviceable biography, but Chandler’s personal torments were made public in Frank McShane’s posthumously ‘authorised’ biography of 1975, and Hiney offers fundamentally the same account. The only child of an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother, Raymond Chandler was raised in England after his father abandoned the family. He ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Cassavetes was of the opposite persuasion, the school of Stanislavsky: he believed in as close an identification as possible between the actor and the character. Although he never attended the Actors Studio, he imbibed the same theatrical culture in his formative years. It’s not a mistake but a sign of deep-seated conviction that, as Carney ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... back to Germany from Norwich to look into the childhood of Max Ferber, an artist based loosely on Frank Auerbach. At 15 Ferber had been sent to England by his parents, who were eventually murdered in the camps at Riga. Sebald finds the silence of the people he encounters weird and unsettling: ‘I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fathers and sons, sisters and brothers’. Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff ...”

“... way women ought to behave exist for a reason, the Cry insist: being correctly ‘feminine’ is close to impossible for any woman to achieve, but the traps and snares built into the game are what keep polite society and the marriage market going. If a girl is too receptive to male advances she’s a whore (‘a creature’); if she turns down a man with a ...”

“... minutiae can be found elsewhere. Instead, I drop in at key moments of his life and get in as close as possible to understanding him and his world, then fade out and drop in again, a few years down the road.’ So, it’s like a movie, or a novel? Not at all, says Mann, ‘I have not fictionalised anything in this book.’ I trust him, though he steadily ...”

“... Introducing​ his text of Hamlet in The Riverside Shakespeare, Frank Kermode calls it ‘the first great tragedy Europe had produced for two thousand years’, and adds, as if conceding to the long academic stress on its highly ‘problematic’ character: ‘how Shakespeare came to write it is, of course, a mystery on which it is useless to speculate ...”

“... elements of his strategy was to request extra Panzer divisions from Hitler, which were to be moved close to the Normandy coast. Hitler was notoriously paranoid about the loyalty of his senior generals, whom he played off against one another, and Rommel knew that such a request had to be made in person. As he noted in his diary, ‘the most urgent problem is to ...”

“... seen his statement (‘a private paper, written in the 1960s’) and excerpted a passage at the close of her introduction as having particular testimonial force: ‘To explain my sudden marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood would require a good many words, and yet the explanation would probably remain unintelligible … To her, the marriage brought no happiness ...”

“... margins of the texts – but what of passages like this, when he describes going up to Cambridge? Frank-hearted maids of rocky Cumberland, You and your not unwelcome days of mirth I quitted, and your nights of revelry, And in my own unlovely cell sate down In lightsome mood.This Wordsworth is lordly and set apart, perhaps mock-heroically self-aggrandising (or ...”

“... Nearly all the young poets of the age strove for formal competence: Lowell, Merwin, Plath and even Frank O’Hara wrote reams of quatrains and sonnets before breaking out into free verse, seemingly all at once, as if to the Muses’ baton. During his tenure as judge of the Yale Younger Poets prize, Auden was frequently unenthused; in 1947, he awarded it to his ...”