“... commissioned through freelancer.com for $75.) The resulting doggerel is sometimes surprisingly frank in its response to the task at hand:0.76. Work00:00:21 → $130.29/HR → 1/1Writing is such a hard jobMuch rather words I would robThose people on ’TurkThey’ll do all the workSo my brain I do not have to prod.Thurston’s name on the cover isn’t a ...”

“... reference to an alter ego, whose biography in a sense we are writing, and to whom we thus come as close as we can. The idea may sound fanciful, but it is pursued with remarkable force and fascination in Richard Holmes’s study. Richard Savage, the young Johnson’s alter ego, was a poor and talented writer whom Johnson had met in Grub Street. Each took a ...”

“... much matters: deterrence deterred and deterred both ways. It worked, for example, against plans by Frank Wisner of the CIA to commit paramilitary groups trained in West Germany to aid the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and it made the Russians generally cautious outside their own sphere. President Glafkos Cleridis of Cyprus has revealed that after the first ...”

“... A Book of New Zealand Verse, there had been only poets who were New Zealanders. In a similar way Frank Sargeson (1903-82) gathered around him a group of determined cohorts who made a distinct New Zealand fiction. There is an un-measurable calculus between what the history of a region requires and the talents of the writers who are called upon to supply ...”

“... death not to have been a meaningless horror. Oswald’s committing the act alone is about as close to meaningless as we can get, and almost any plot is better than that. In March 1963, a few months before Kennedy’s assassination, Thomas Pynchon published a novel in which a character learns what is said to be ‘life’s single lesson’: ‘that there ...”

“... likely to have derived his eclectic borrowings? No single source can be cited with confidence: as Frank Manuel showed years ago (The 18th Century confronts the Gods, 1959), comparative mythology had been advancing for more than one hundred years. Jacob Bryant’s A New System; or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1775) was mentioned once by Blake, and he ...”

“... the letters of Cicero, translate them into another language, then back into Latin, then check how close he had come to the original. He should study the letters of stylish contemporaries such as Languet’s friend the historian and spy Pietro Bizzarri, a sample letter from whom (in Italian) Languet sent Sidney in November 1573, hoping that ‘in admiring it ...”

“... nephew Griffin Dunne, lacks the three-in-the-morning question. It begins with a bridge and a blur, close-ups of bare feet and fresh typewriter ink. A rat crawls over a hippie, to show that in the Swinging Sixties, anything can happen. When Didion herself appears, her mouth is bright with lipstick and amused. Her gestures are as large as fireworks. She puts her ...”

“... The first real mutiny novel, Edward Money’s The Wife and the Ward (1859), captured this frank, demoralising view by ending with the massacre of Kanpur, and the death of all the protagonists. Unsurprisingly, later novels would conclude on a brighter, triumphant note, making Kanpur less like the charge of the Light Brigade and more like the Alamo ...”

“... on the analogy of the scientist as much as the humanist; for administrators the studio was as close to the laboratory as to the library carrel. This development is another significant part of the Bauhaus legacy.Another idea that bridged the gap between pragmatists and technophiles at the Bauhaus was abstraction, which was treated not only as a method but ...”

“... example, a not generously staffed and already busy Book Marketing Council, seem insurmountable. Frank Delaney’s notion of a fortnight’s festival in London in the autumn, tied to a BBC 2 book festival, similarly needs to be extended nationally, and so does the newly conceived Edinburgh Book Bonanza, which ran during its Festival. Perhaps the closest ...”

“... the care of the young of administering corporal correction and providing them with a media for the frank expression of opinion.Corpun’s ‘unique literary service’ actually consisted of pamphlets, often with introductions by eager clergymen, entitled Girl’s Beating: Punishment Postures, which landed him in court, despite his claim to be upholding ...”

“... was an impassioned and lifelong militant for the cause of racial equality, and therefore for years close to the Communists. Though never in the Party – even the FBI satisfied itself of this after years of investigation – he was nevertheless (if I may quote my own memories of him) much more than the generic New Deal ‘progressive’ to which Stowe tries to ...”

“... John Ashbery, who combines the exaltation of Wallace Stevens with the shrugging insouciance of Frank O’Hara in order to come up with poems as expressive and as inscrutable as Reverdy’s. If Merrill was experimental, then it was in the way Bach played with harmonics and textual interpretation in a late cantata such as ‘Ich glaube, lieber Herr, hilf ...”

“... herself to be a witness to a monstrous piece of history (‘I was in the same barracks as Anne Frank. Of course, I didn’t know who she was then. There were just some Dutch girls. They cried all the time.’) Watching the VJ Day commemorations brought it back. ‘I saw those old men, Japanese prisoners of war, and I thought: you shouldn’t forget. Nobody ...”