“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... indeed receive the royal nod. Instead, Roth chose Blake Bailey, the well-regarded biographer of Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend), Richard Yates and John Cheever, three alcohol-plagued novelists whose torments kept late hours. As it happened Atlas would outlive Roth only by a year, dying in September 2019 from complications of a lung condition. At the ...”

“... relationship with the Lacanian enterprise entered a new phase. He went into analysis with Charles Melman, a prominent Freudian School analyst. Now, on his way to becoming an analyst, he could present himself as the legitimate heir not only of Lacan’s science but of his analytic kingdom as a whole, and would then be in the best position possible to ...”

“... only the extraordinary durability of her presence, as if continually incarnated afresh with the passage of time due to some occult operation of the Great Art of Light and Shade. One odd thing. As Svengali, Hank Mann had achieved a posthumous success. Although it was he who had brushed her with Stardust (she’d been a mere ‘leading player’ up till ...”

“... a whistle, but even shriller – I see Oliver Twist among A heaping of office ledgers. Go ask Charles Dickens this, How it was in London then: The old City with Dombey’s office, The yellow waters of the Thames. There is a salubrious élan about much of the book, and the fact that this is indeed a book, not just a selection of the significant ...”

“... journalist and author. After well-received books on the parliamentary crisis of 1910 and on Charles Dilke, he undertook a biography of Asquith, a figure he admired and identified with. Campbell supplies a long list of characteristics the two shared, including a ‘lack of interest in speculative thought’. His standing as a serious journalist was ...”

“... aside, Bernhardt always had a soft spot, she said, for the entire Bonaparte family); Charles Haas (elegant model for Proust’s Swann); ‘Bertie’, the cuddly future Edward VII; the artist-engraver Gustave Doré; and at least one woman, the trouser-wearing sculptor Louise Abbéma. Gottlieb refers to Abbéma, somewhat ungallantly, as ...”

“... Mann seems to believe, stems from a fatal self-misunderstanding. He has in mind the boast of Charles Krauthammer and other neo-con ideologues that the US today is the most powerful polity in history. With bases in 132 countries, America has ‘the first military force deployable over the entire world’. Moreover, since 1991, it has had no ...”