“... official with the UN states that MacArthur told him: ‘No evidence has been found of any close connection between the Soviet Union and the North Korean aggression ... MacArthur thought that, if it had really inspired the North Korean aggression, the Soviet Union would not have abandoned the North Koreans so completely, giving them no assistance ...”

“... date than used to be supposed. From the end of the Hannibalic Wars, when Rome was thrown into close contact with Greeks in Italy and in the Greek territories of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Roman upper classes took over the whole Greek apparatus for creating the amenities of life. Not only literature and art but ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is offered a £369 package trip to Memphis (‘Free Trip to Tupelo – Welcoming Elvis Party with Close Elvis Friends’); or the more distant economic possibility of a ‘life-size cold-cast bronze or copper statue of Elvis’ at £25,000. Pure white hand-polished busts of Elvis come in beautiful ‘marbelene’. Item G21 in the list is the Memorial Elvis ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Anglo-American liberal imperialism occasionally berate his prejudices. Historians such as Frank Prochaska and Hugh Tulloch have portrayed him as a believer in the Anglo-Saxon racial mission. In truth, no one has pushed these partisan readings very far, because Bryce was too fastidious a writer to scatter wild generalisations through his writing. On ...”

“... next year, but she noticed that Blair didn’t seem very happy about it. He’d wanted to appoint Frank Field, who, Blair says in his memoir, A Journey, was ‘hugely persuasive on the big picture’, and told her that Field would ‘lead’ on welfare reform. Field told the civil servants he’d have her job within a year and they should take strategic ...”

“... Laughter in the Dark, described Nabokov as ‘a kind of Satanic Mantovani, coming into cruel close-up on your screens at the end of the compelling torment to ask (the question mark ironic): “You have been distressed by my music, you worms?” ’ All three critics share the comforting belief that, au fond, the artist is great because he is morally ...”

“... 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 ...”