“... of his Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, or Second Defence of the English People, which Barbara Lewalski, in her biography, oddly calls his ‘least attractive work’, Milton gives thanks to God chiefly for three reasons. The first, in George Burnett’s 1809 translation, is that I was born in those times of my country, when the effulgent virtue ...”

“... only every second time. I can think of several writers for whom this rule should be relaxed. Barbara Everett, for example, is proof that the traditional academic study of English literature, armed against theory and sensitive to real life, is the only sort of attention adequate to the subject. Her presence in the anthology would be a powerful reminder of ...”

“... more so than when I’d seen him in the spring. His wife Norris was with him and also his sister Barbara. ‘The car service didn’t turn up,’ Norman said. ‘And they said it was outside but they were fucking lying and that’s the worst thing, the lying.’ Gunter nodded noncommittally when Norman greeted him with a ton of the old Mailer ...”

“... of the routinely colossal bill (a huge 300-pound, six-footer-plus, de Michelis was an expensive guest all by himself, as he never was, for he combined a gourmand’s appetite with a gourmet’s insistence on expensive delicacies and costly labels). But it was in his own Venice fiefdom that Gianni de Michelis most truly resembled an Oriental potentate. The ...”

“... terms of the debate’. More important, these large claims have been enthusiastically endorsed by Barbara Tuchman, Saul Bellow, Lucy Dawidowicz, Arthur Goldberg and many others, and by sundry American newspapers and periodicals, including the Washington Post, Commentary and the New Republic. On the other hand, Norman Finkelstein has described the book as one ...”

“... embarrass yourself. You get the distinct feeling Kelley disapproves of Sinatra’s fourth wife, Barbara, because she insisted on giving millions rather than thousands to certain charities, such as a programme for sexually abused children. A lose-lose situation: keep your money to yourself and you’re pilloried as the unfeeling rich; spend all your time ...”

“... mannerisms and quirks and the book-lined New York apartments in which they meet, one feels like a guest at some fancy uptown intellectual cocktail party: that is to say, safe and sound, vaguely ennobled by the conversation, and avid (even as one sips discreetly at one’s glass of Sancerre) to hear as much about other people’s bad behaviour as one can. The ...”

“... were mats for the dressing-table, coasters for the coffee table, runners for the dining table; guest towels with matching flannels for the basin, lavatory mats with matching ones for the bath. They had cake slices and fish slices and other slices besides, delicate trowels in silver and bone the precise function of which Mrs Ransome had never been able to ...”

“... mistress. The foreign minister Gabriel Hanotaux, champion of colonial expansion in Africa, was a guest at his dinner table. This was a republican elite of distinctly roturier origins: Faure had been a tanner, Hanotaux’s father was a provincial lawyer. When Proust’s mother followed his father to the grave, he inherited at the age of 34 a fortune of about ...”