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“... that of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen and Joseph Addison, like that of Thackeray and Shaw and Mark Twain. Like these writers, Tom Wolfe might be described as a brooding humanistic presence. There is a decided moral edge to his humour. Wofe never tells us what to believe exactly; rather, he shows us examples of good and (most often) bad form. He has ...”

“... view that he was a smug, snuff-coloured little prig. East Coast journalists used to take Mark Twain at his own self-performed value too, referring to him as ‘the wild humorist of the Pacific slope’. It’s as though the metropolitan finds it difficult to think of a man from the provinces – from further ‘west’ – as anything other than ...”

“... W.B. Yeats. He knew both Henry James and Tennessee Williams, patronised Masefield and Ezra Pound. Mark Twain wrote a poem about him ... Altogether, Witter Bynner seems too large a person to be discussed merely as an appendage of D.H. Lawrence. This collection of letters (selected from more than seven thousand) represents the fifth volume of Bynner’s ...”

“... All humans have been aroused by art, have cried before it – and destroyed it.In A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain called Titian’s Venus of Urbino ‘the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses’, joking that it was made for a brothel but ‘probably refused because it was a trifle too strong. In truth, it is too strong for any place ...”

“... types were familiar: the poet-professor, inordinately pleased with his apposite quotations from Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy; the passionate youth who didn’t want to read anything at all, so that his feelings and insights would remain pure; the shy, spiritual poet who, when asked how Buddhism had informed his poetry, replied, ‘I like the ...”

“... poetry, he doesn’t acknowledge that the two shared a nearly fatal attraction to singsong metres. Mark Twain was a generation younger, but the great ironist and prankster, a teller of ghost stories whose visionary money-making schemes, like Poe’s, always came to nothing, is notably absent from these pages. Instead it is Verlaine and Rimbaud; Mallarmé ...”

“... This is a lot, but if it were all it would make him no more than a racial stereotype out of the Mark Twain era. I think a failure of inwardness occurs because, to avoid this stereotype, André Brink substitutes for it at crucial moments a very different model – and in the historical circumstances of 1825 an unlikely one: a modern existential and ...”

“... of the desert were yellow, biscuit, ash, rose, brick, silvery green, sullen green. Hardly a human mark or scratch was to be seen beyond the mess of the city: but if you went out along the highways you would find at intervals, under bloated plastic and neon signs, all-American strips or zips of hamburger joints, motels, gas-stations and used-car lots. Then ...”

“... the art he deployed in at least twelve plays with such magnificent success. The arch-rationalist Mark Twain held Sir Walter Scott to blame for the disabling romanticism of the American South: Tennessee Williams, brought up on the Waverley novels, was a joyful victim of the disease. ‘I write out of love for the South … I think the war between ...”

“... as an innocent abroad: a role studied from Sketches by Boz, perhaps, or the early journalism of Mark Twain. The spectacle of military discipline and military technology, for example, always provoked attacks of acute innocence. ‘How it’s done, the civilian’s mind cannot tell.’ On such occasions, Kipling appears as a ‘mere outsider’ or an ...”

“... the piano’s one-step-forward, one-step-back into a better beat. The doubt and trepidation that mark the borders of the song aren’t lessened, but the territory within is singing with energy; the uncertainty that a moment before said fear now says who cares. The rhythm becomes a chase after pleasure; the chase is caught and let loose for the pleasure of ...”

“... been brought out West in a covered waggon. Her first dancing teacher had a name straight out of Mark Twain, Mrs Argue Buckspitt. In Lulu in Hollywood she describes an unconventionally idyllic childhood, full of books, music and freedom. It sounds too good to be true; yet proves to be true in every detail, even to the music her beautiful, unhappy mother ...”

“... Birney of Kentucky, the brilliant fugitive slave leaders Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, Mark Twain, Mississippi journalist Hodding Carter and Martin Luther King Jr, to name just a few from the last two centuries. These figures are not to be found in The Southern Tradition, but Southern they were. Even if racism could be purged from the ...”

“... Sawyer ‘would be president, yet, if he escaped hanging’, they admire his chutzpah. In 1885, Mark Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Friedrich Drumpf, apprentice barber, arrived in New York Harbor. He came from the village of Kallstadt, in southwest Germany, but his son and grandson would do a lot of business with Jews — why ...”

“... ever think to say). ‘It isn’t so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember,’ Mark Twain remarked in later life, ‘as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so.’ Life is so full of wild incongruities and strangeness, of alternate realities. Why not go ahead and suspend disbelief; anything is possible. At the same ...”