“... It has all become too ugly, too personal. Weather can no longer be mentioned in polite society. As Peter Redgrove points out in his provocative study, The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense, we are ‘so violently affected by weather change ... that it can easily become a clinical problem’. Redgrove confesses himself a ‘Jekyll and Hyde to the weather’. He ...”

“... his bleeding face, and if we are as severe as these editors, and if we want to keep that moment (Peter Brook, for example, didn’t), we have really to accept a version of the play that lacks over a hundred lines found only in the Folio. The General Introduction ably defends these editorial principles, and along the way gives a very lucid and engaging ...”

“... period which coincides closely with his rereading and rewriting of his literary corpus for the New York Edition. Armstrong’s hypothesis, supported by analysis of James’s descriptions of the process of revision in letters and prefaces, is that the chewing-over and purification of bodily process is equivalent to that of the process of revision. The ...”

“... For example, suppose that in the course of the construction of a new movie theatre in New York, an accident injures a pedestrian as severely as Jones has been injured. Here we have to compare the burden on any individual of a general slight risk of injury from construction accidents with the burden on each of those same individuals of ruling out all ...”

“... the pace of Pinget translations seems to have been hotted up by an enterprising small press in New York, Red Dust, who have not only reinstated the missing Passacaglia out proceeded to fill most remaining gaps with their stylish and relatively cheap publications. That Voice (Pinget’s penultimate novel, dating from 1975) appears in the company of Between ...”

“... a slight resentment towards translations, and in his clever ‘Poem Waiting to be Translated’, Peter Porter asks: Why not remember the heroes of hard situations, those who answered inquisitors in fresh parables, whose lyrical rejoinders are assembled here in memorial Penguins? Porter is glancing at the work of Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz, and ...”

“... nothing to do with misfortune. It was the result of systematic fraud, conducted by what the New York District Attorney called ‘a corrupt and criminal organisation’ over a period of nearly twenty years. The mastermind behind the fraud was Agha Hassan Abedi. Abedi had what is known inside banks as charisma and outside banks as a nice line in drivel. He ...”

“... by singers and conductors to the stodgy naturalistic productions put on by companies like New York’s Metropolitan or the revisionist stagings originally mounted by Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson, during the post-war years at Bayreuth and followed variously there and elsewhere by Patrice Chéreau, Götz Friedrich, Ruth Berghaus, Harry ...”

“... at pinning down the origin of urban legends, and rural ones too. Alligators in the sewers of New York? Probably not, though alien big cats are real enough. Spectral pedestrians are never children, though many children are killed on the roads. They are better attested than phantom hitch-hikers, though the latter predate the motor car: there is a 17th-century ...”

“... in social issues, and he used sex in his writings as a way of describing power relations. As Peter Wagner demonstrated in Eros Revived (1988), politicised pornography was an 18th-century commonplace. Sade’s pornography, as one would expect from a man who so calamitously lacked the power to refrain, is boringly exaggerated. The interminable and ...”

“... mass imprisonment and torture of dissidents. When David Cameron held a meeting with Sisi in New York in September he spoke of ‘Egypt’s pivotal role in the region’ and its importance to British policy. ‘Both economically and in the fight against Islamist extremism’, he said, Egypt was a crucial ally and the UK was ‘keen to expand practical ...”

“... Anthony Deane said Petty’s design ‘must needs prove a folly’. The navy commissioner Peter Pett told Pepys that the double-hulled ship was ‘the most dangerous thing in the world’: if it was successful, the secret would get out, and it would be the ruin of English trade and sea power. The Dutch, with whom England was about to fight the second ...”

“... Several months.’ ‘Wullah! What would one do in Damascus for months? What is wrong with New York?’ (A foreigner is always an American here.) ‘I’m English,’ I said. He mumbled a welcome. Then, why was I not going on to Lebanon? In Damascus I could see the Great Mosque and the big bazaar in an afternoon. Then I could go to Beirut. He had heard ...”

“... The Cinémathèque in Paris played an important role, but the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the key venue for the preservation of Hollywood’s greatest period of achievement. Hollywood itself never was, and Peter Bogdanovich’s originality as a curator lay in his awareness that it never would be. (Until the ...”

“... however, Charcot had nothing to do with it. In 1931, Charcot’s son wrote a letter to the New York Times Book Review: ‘Without contesting the literary and imaginative qualities of Dr Munthe I can certify that Dr Munthe never was trained by my father … I was, myself, a student at the Salpêtrière then, and can certify that he was not one of his ...”