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“... to know nothing of ‘the world’. ‘I am a child you know,’ he tells the young wards of John Jarndyce. ‘You are designing people compared with me.’ Skimpole’s main similarity to his real-life source, apart from a talent for accepting handouts, is his conversational manner, which is peculiarly fanciful, fluent and charming, but there are other ...”

“... a lot of time staring at Hilliard, who stood just ‘two yards’ away, a spruce figure with curly brown hair and a lofty manner not quite fitting for a picture-maker. His courtesies, delivered in an accent bearing traces of broad Devonshire, gave way to long discomfiting silences as he worked his magic with the ‘pencil’, a superfine paintbrush of ...”

“... Vermont to write Talk of the Town, or to drop off new stories. Kincaid’s second book, Annie John, a collection of interrelated stories, was published as a novel in 1985, followed by Lucy in 1990 and The Autobiography of My Mother in 1996. The protagonist of Autobiography of My Mother is 70-year-old Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother ...”

“... hair: ‘fairly long, covered the ears, straight hair’. He added: ‘It was very light brown in colour. After he had been running it was messed and fell to the sides of the man’s face.’ No description of the facial features was given to the policeman. Brooks said that he was not sure that he could identify the man again. Afterwards, Brooks saw ...”

“... is the collection now housed in Amherst.) Dickinson, Bingham explains, wrote on backs of brown-paper bags or of discarded bills, programmes, and invitations; on tiny scraps of stationery pinned together; on leaves torn from old notebooks (one such sheet dated ‘1824’); on soiled and mildewed subscription blanks, or on department or drug-store ...”

“... the most written about poet of our time – over three thousand items, Pierre Joris reckons. John Felstiner’s book is of inestimable value to anyone wanting to read Celan with understanding. It provides a sort of triple deal, giving a rudimentary narrative of the life, and combining this with translations and brilliant readings of maybe four or five ...”

“... John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities ...”

“... the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Donald Trump’s (then) chief of staff, John Kelly, went on Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.’ Kelly’s ...”

“... magazine targeted readers who did not want it to end. Soldier of Fortune was founded by Robert K. Brown, a former Green Beret based in Boulder, Colorado, who made the profitable discovery that his publication could double as an employment agency for mercenaries and a weaponry catalogue. The magazine’s classified ads offered an eclectic menu of ...”

“... Susan Sontag wrote, ‘in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.’ John Donne believed that illness is the kingdom, that it steals in and corrupts our lives: ‘The disease hath established a Kingdome, an Empire in mee, and will have certaine Arcana Imperii, secrets of State, by which it will proceed.’ Both perspectives are ...”

“... 155 east-west streets drawn on open land in 1807. The grid was a piece of real estate speculation (John Jacob Astor made his fortune not by trading furs, as American folklore has it, but by buying up blocks as the city pushed north); nevertheless, Koolhaas calls it, with Corbusierian hyperbole, ‘the most courageous act of prediction in Western ...”

“... coveted on the right. The court’s thinking is detailed in a majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, concurring opinions by Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and dissents by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.* Roberts held that the admissions programmes at Harvard and UNC ran afoul of the ...”

“... peglegs: all press-ganged upstream with Adam Dalgleish’s impersonator, Roy Marsden, for the Long John Silver show at the Mermaid. James is left with a heritage trail of selective quotations, a London Dungeon of waxwork crimes exhibited in authentic locations. This is an empty set, a set defined by its architecture (where even Mandy the Temp, in her ...”

“... are born. Are we really free? Or is free-will and responsibility an illusion? In July 1978, Louise Brown precipitated and focused some of these concerns. She was born after an entirely normal pregnancy, but from a conception that took place in a laboratory dish. Moral or not? Legal or not? Playing God? Her existence was made possible by the work of Patrick ...”

“... know nothing about), we sold out to a property millionaire and I accepted an offer to join Curtis Brown, the agents. Small publishing is a risky undertaking at best. I remember John Lehmann’s warning: ‘You sit there listening to the rats under the floorboards.’ As a sailor, I would prefer to say that storm cones were ...”