“... a lifelong Chicagoan); they are insincere slackers and draft dodgers – in a word, liberals. The passage reminded Republicans of their party demographics, their strength in the exurbs, and prepared the ground for an assault on the metropolitan manners and mores of their Democratic opponents, in a depressingly effective piece of hokum. In Alaska, she has ...”

“... feelings. ‘Ambivalence has to be distinguished from having mixed feelings about someone,’ Charles Rycroft writes in his appropriately entitled A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis: ‘It refers to an underlying emotional attitude in which the contradictory attitudes derive from a common source and are interdependent, whereas mixed feelings may be ...”

“... gives much sound advice about how to write so as to be understood. If Graves had applied to the passage from The White Goddess I’ve just quoted the principles set out in The Reader over Your Shoulder, he would have found in it a clear violation of Principle 5 (‘There should never be any doubt left as to when’), and probably of Principle 6 (‘There ...”

“... longer than him to learn it.’ Was this what led him to romanticise failure – the failure of Charles Ryder to get religion or to get Julia, the failure of Guy Crouchback to make his fellow officers see what the war was really about?What is it, then, that makes Waugh a deviant in the history of our culture? Not, surely, that he was a man of the Right, an ...”

“... RPF officials, many of whom I knew when they were still rebels, won’t return my calls. Finally, Charles Murigande, who is in charge of foreign affairs, comes to my hotel. I launch into a lengthy profession of good faith. He replies with a Rwandan proverb: ‘There’s no use drinking milk on a stomach full of hatred. It’ll throw up blood.’ With this, he ...”

“... Bart or Undine Spragg, routinely anathematise the hypocritical society matrons who obstruct their passage to wealth and status: their aversion seems grounded in Wharton’s own polite loathing of her grand yet self-absorbed mother. In the mordantly sapphic novels of Elizabeth Bowen, older women are depicted as seductive and treacherous – enchanting ...”

“... a rich and instructive experience.At an event in Berkeley, a man in the audience said there was a passage from the book he wanted to hear me read. During the intervening years, I have had such requests a handful of times, always from men, always involving a passage that turns out to have some kind of sexual content. But at ...”

“... thing in the world for Carlyle to have given a book to his mother. But the most significant passage comes shortly after he has been given the news of her death: ‘She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology and science but in the public history of my own country, in its ...”

“... has at moments appeared to be something of an illusion, or even his Achilles’ heel. Despite the passage of the healthcare bill, it remains to be seen whether rhetoric can fully triumph over the crushing anomie of state bureaucracy and the realities of political power. And that is not to speak of the lethal counter-enthusiasm, the ugly, race-tinted hatreds ...”

“... he gave a speech that seems the prototype for Trump’s inaugural. In fact, Trump delivered no passage as inflammatory as Buchanan’s ‘there is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war’; and he issued no call to battle comparable with Buchanan’s peroration: as the US army in the riots of that year ‘took ...”

“... would also have been ‘prepared’ by notes supplied to an earlier printing of Moby Dick by Charles Feidelson, in which he refers us to the infidel queen of death, who puts in an appearance only three brief chapters earlier, and, more intricately, to what Ahab, closer by, calls his ‘unknown mother’. My own contribution, if it hasn’t already been ...”

“... than he needed). Victor was writing in 360. A path of evasion offered, it is true: the suspect passage might belong not to Victor but to Victor’s source. That path is now blocked. Exact scrutiny establishes many more traces of the epitomator in diverse sections of the HA. Not merely facts, but inspiration for the author to embark on stretches of ...”

“... Cemetery beside others who had fought and suffered for the cause of Ireland: Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, Paddy Dignam. Although there is a large collection of Casement documents in the National Library in Dublin (and other items which he brought back from Africa and South America – including costumes and a butterfly collection – in the ...”

“... the ancestral tribe of authors, editors and cartoonists who came before – Peter Arno, Charles Addams, John O’Hara, John Cheever, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, J.D. Salinger, E.B. White, Katharine White (the Mrs White of his telegram) and the sainted William Maxwell – nor did he pull up the ladder against younger novices coming aboard. So ...”

“... of scary and absurd prison tattoos. He describes these droll insigniae in a typically deadpan passage in his autobiography:One guy did one of Pan. Pan played his little horn and all the women followed him. He’d take them into a cave and ball them, and then the women would disappear. They’d never find them again. I had Pan put on my left forearm, and ...”