“... genres. True, Fahrenheit 451 seemed to prove that Science Fiction was outside his range: but there may have been personal strains on Truffaut then – including that of filming in England, with uneasy backing and a perhaps too-pat idea. Tirez sur le pianiste, his second full-length feature, had actually been enrichedby mixing slapstick, melodrama, romance and ...”

“... modern sensibility.’ He cannot get over the idea of Thomas’s modern sensibility (whatever that may be exactly) and uses the phrase three times more in the same chapter. And his language becomes positively untrained: Thomas is ‘exquisitely sincere and sensitive’; his poems ‘seem to happen’. Yet as soon as he gets on to the Sitwells the cogency and ...”

“... such a culture, when it is officially sponsored by even the most benevolent and enlightened state, may easily serve to maintain a very non-utopian status quo. If there is an embarrassing absence of utopian imagination in a book that loudly decries the failure to think boldly about a different future, there is no dearth of attempts to do so in the recent ...”

“... we can imagine them holding their conversational own, over the capons and teal. What changed on 4 May 1557 was incorporation: a charter endorsed by Philip and Mary granted the Stationers a nationwide monopoly on printing, and the right to seize, burn or amend illegal books; to buy and sell property; to bring lawsuits in court; to gather whenever they ...”

“... Della is the furthest thing available to literature from a prostitute, whatever that thing may be. Jack, though fallen, is careful to free himself of base sexual intent. They share a love of poetry. Her presence beside him reminds him of Milton’s embracing angels: ‘total they mix, union of pure with pure.’ They sit through the night among the ...”

“... Barzun, R.P. Blackmur, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Robert Fitzgerald, Leslie Fiedler and John Crowe Ransom – this last its founder as a school of literary criticism ‘to teach those who teach it’. Marianne Moore, in Brooklyn, had a quieter time, but was just as much in touch with them all through friends and ...”

“... consisted of one chief clerk, seven subordinate clerks and a messenger. The US minister to France, Robert Livingston, had no staff.When Trump moves into the White House on 20 January, he will take charge of around 2.8 million non-military federal employees working in hundreds of departments and agencies sprawled throughout the Beltway and beyond. Trump gets to ...”

“... no British novels that, like Catch 22, approach war as lunacy made real, or implicitly ask, like Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, why running dope is worse than killing unarmed Vietnamese. Such a mixture of the macabre and the grotesque with a touch of anarchy is not a British vein. There are extraordinary figures in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour ...”

“... while still an undergraduate at Columbia, where Mark Van Doren was his teacher and mentor; and Robert Penn Warren was the editor (at Southern Review) whom he first sought to impress. But if the New Critical aesthetic disciplined Berryman it also inhibited him. It gave him a good technical training, but its insistence on what he later called ‘Eliot’s ...”

“... the upheaval (already latent in the first hours of conflict) soon became glaringly apparent: in May, radical demonstrators were attempting to storm and overthrow the National Assembly created by the February Revolution in Paris, while in Vienna Austrian democrats protested against the slow pace of liberal reform and established a Committee of Public ...”

“... when it has a mind to be, and in 1984 had more than ten years to put together such a grouping. It may be too late, or close to too late, now. The policy may or may not have been a feasible one. What impressed me, and startled Westminster friends much more versed in politics than I ...”

“... by the ‘new journalism’, one of whose tactics was to magnify editorial personalities. It may be surmised that this owed something to the Victorian theatre cult of the star actor-manager, or the pulpit cult of the star preacher like Spurgeon. Hardie’s insistence on his own policies and methods led to unseemly squabbles with the paper’s ...”

“... to an occasional session of sweet silent thought, or even to the consulting of a concordance. Robert Browning, Luria, 1846 – I dedicate this last attempt for the present at Dramatic Poetry to a Great Dramatic Poet: ‘Wishing what I write may be read by his light’: if a phrase originally addressed, by not the ...”

“... predecessors, they can perform the tasks for which they are militarily adequate (whatever these may be) for desirable or undesirable ends. But unlike most of their predecessors’, their destructive character is so utterly appalling that the prospect of their being in fact used for desirable ends is certainly an extraordinarily unlikely eventuality and ...”

“... nothing in the night-time. But on the whole Holmes’s clues are objects, particularly those that may be detected through a magnifying-glass: Holmes’s glass is almost as famous as his deerstalker cap. Some of the clues, although solid, must be described as transparent too. There is often a largeness, as well as innocence, about these minutiae which ...”