“... promenading into print and creating a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer Gordon Lish, who bore the dashing ...”

“... turn to, still is perhaps, if you wished to point to a sculpture of essences. It was (until Henry Moore) the cartoonist’s favoured notion of modern sculpture – in 1926 the New Yorker published a drawing by Helen Hokinson of two toqued ladies circling a Bird in Space, shaping themselves to its undulating line. Sculpture as essence, sculpture as pure ...”

“... W. The second lesson was that – with some important exceptions like the work of Barrington Moore, Jr – the extension of political science to comparative politics tended to proceed, consciously or unconsciously, on the basis of the US example: one measured how far other countries were progressing in approximating America’s liberty, respect for ...”

“... the cloud that hung over public discourse for so many years got into writers’ bones, too. Brian Moore was angry at the fact that his father, who was a well read man, had been ‘brainwashed into the notion that people such as Belloc and Chesterton were the greatest English writers of their day’. When he went to Dublin after the war everyone was talking ...”

“... rest begins to make sense. Genre is not the issue. Of equal interest, we learn, is the fact that Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project, having grown over thirteen years to ‘epic proportions’, was ‘evidently on its way to being interminable’. Or that the Catalan writer Josep Pla ‘took the slim record he had begun on his 21st ...”

“... of our predecessors, not as sudden or unforeseeable eruptions. Rather than being a ‘storm’, as Walter Benjamin described it, history is a perpetual process of sowing and reaping. Liberal democracy struggles to sustain authority under these conditions, because elections are experienced as mere staging posts in a historical longue durée, rather than as ...”

“... which had built up an artificial nature.’ (Another candidate for transformation – he reads Walter Pater – is not so lucky, being despatched by a Mad Mullah on page 140.) Kipling was less sanguine. His early stories show innocence broken rather than transformed, and Britain separated from the British in India by irreconcilable differences of ...”

“... his understanding of Marxism. By the 1970s he is writing in New Society about Victor Serge and Walter Benjamin, independent Marxists who were opposed to the Party line or idiosyncratic in their interpretation of Marxist theory. Serge was a former anarchist who was soon expelled from the Party and ended up as a ‘left oppositionist’, disenchanted with ...”

“... largely by technological possibilities. From the mid-1970s, Frederick Sanger at Cambridge and Walter Gilbert at Harvard had developed ways of working out the nucleotide sequence of particular genes – ‘reading their code’ – and at NINDS Venter adapted those methods, slow and laborious as they then were, to determine the sequence of the adrenaline ...”

“... up at auctions, and fetch good prices too, chief justices, lords lieutenant, lords mayor, George Moore, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Walter Osborne, Jack Yeats, my famous namesake his brother Bill, Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge, young painters like Paddy Tuohy who really did paint old J.S. Joyce and died of ...”

“... included him talking at length to Myra Hess (whose voice I’ve never heard before) and also to Walter Legge, both of whom were fascinating and with no indication in Amis’s voice that he himself is well past his sell-by date.Consistently good, too, is Last Word, the obituary programme on Radio 4, and The Archive Hour, which on 7 July was about Harold ...”

“... and it seemed such play. Less play was Beyond the Fringe, but that had its sillier side. Dudley Moore had an act – never, I think, done in public – about a patient in hospital calling the nurse for a bedpan. He had quite plump arms and a raspberry blown against his upper arm sounded particularly revolting. This was accompanied by increasingly desperate ...”

“... and Lords Eldon, Liverpool and Sidmouth. There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from ...”

“... Mário Zagallo’s tears after Brazil’s consecutive tournament victories (Chile 1962); Bobby Moore borne aloft by Geoff Hurst and Ray Wilson (England 1966); Gordon Banks’s ‘Save of the Century’, and Moore and Pelé swapping shirts (Brazil 1970); the Cruyff turn (West Germany 1974); Maradona about to take on six ...”

“... can’t kill them all. When I kill one, I create three.’ I heard that Congressman Walter Jones, Republican from North Carolina and the man who renamed French fries ‘freedom fries’, was now calling for the withdrawal of US troops. I heard him say: ‘The American people are getting to a point here: how much more can we take?’ I heard ...”