“... he looked at it, and saw his own face, and his own salvation, his own sexual nature. And that may be the problem. He saw himself too clearly, settled too many scores with that first book. Too much was fixed in there. Plimpton quotes something he said later on: Do you remember the young boy who goes to a crumbling mansion in search of his father and finds ...”

“... in these books by the light they shed on public matters? Secret Affairs, the most sordid tale, may seem to have the greatest policy significance. But although the trouble between Welles and Hull sucks in many other foreign policy characters (like William Bullitt, with whom Roosevelt broke over the Welles exposé), it has little political ...”

“... which would sustain the power and wealth of the owners of capital. Workers believed that ‘a man may do as he chooses with his own’ and thus that the capitalist’s right to hire and fire was an expression of the same freedom as their own right to leave one employer and work for another; or they believed that the capitalist’s profits were a just reward ...”

“... gets bad reviews at a fashion opening and immediately bans the press from all future ones, he may seem to be indulging in a silly fit of pique, but in fact such a move is often a necessary business tactic. Commercial buyers may pledge huge sums in advance of a show, against the clothes they expect to order from it in ...”

“... These days, it takes a Reader. I began by asking what book history is, but the harder question may be why anyone should care. From the outside, the discipline appears almost wilfully esoteric. (One of the most prominent figures missing from Finkelstein and McCleery’s Reader, David Scott Kastan, has riffed on ‘New Criticism’, ‘New Historicism’ and ...”

“... as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world’. In May he and the increasingly unstable Zelda moved to Saint-Raphaël on the French Riviera, partly to escape the dissipations of Great Neck (the model for Gatsby’s West Egg), described by Ring Lardner as ‘a continuous round of parties … covering pretty nearly ...”

“... well Committed, as Unamended, by Mr Pope in his late Edition of this Poet (1726), a title which we may think asked for trouble. In 1729 the poem became The Dunciad Variorum, slightly revised and now with elaborate encrustations of preface, commentary, appendix etc. The mock-epic had grown a mock-apparatus in which the judgments and the personal follies of ...”

“... law of nature, in the case of Nazism, or history, in the case of Stalinism. Because ideology ‘may decide that those who today eliminate races’ – or classes – ‘are tomorrow those who must be sacrificed’, terror must ‘fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim’. The purpose of totalitarianism, in ...”

“... Observations (1917) and the Poems 1909-1925 were dedicated to the memory of Verdenal, who died in May 1915 in the assault on Gallipoli. ‘For Jean Verdenal,’ Eliot’s inscription runs, ‘mort aux Dardanelles,’ followed by an epigraph from Dante’s Purgatorio: ‘Or puoi la quantitate/comprender dell’amor ch’a te mi scalda,/quando dismento nostra ...”

“... administered with a smile of feigned hospitality; and, whatever tactical pretences to piety they may at times be obliged to make, they are one and all irreligious sensualists, fatally wedded to the fleeting delights of the body. With appropriate slipperiness, these stock aspects of the favourite can all look like metaphors for one another, with the ...”

“... deliver the goods, disappeared a generation ago. The moral critique – the belief that capitalism may deliver the goods but does so inequitably – disappeared more recently, but it has disappeared. One effect has been to transform the Labour Party’s attitude to the private sector. For much of its history it regarded that sector as a burden the economy had ...”

“... diagnosed early, simply because ordinary teachers are more likely to refer a difficult child who may be autistic, and parents will encourage that because there is no longer any stigma and there is more institutional support. The raising of consciousness by autism advocates and others, including novelists, has immeasurably improved the lives of autists not ...”

“... So irregular, appealing and – if one may say – so pitiable a figure is the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) that he comfortably resists summary description. Even his biographer, Robert Mächler, begins by warning himself, via a feisty sentence of his subject’s: ‘No one is entitled to behave towards me as if they knew me ...”

“... would have carried on suffering in silence had it not been for McLachlan’s coming forward. This may all have been technically true, but it sounded politically false, because it was hard to believe that Costello had had no hand in the timing of the revelations. Finally, Costello came across as a man who could dish it out but couldn’t take it. As one ...”

“... poems were written between 1914 and 1918 and a couple of years after. The only partial exception may be the religious verse he wrote in the last few years of his life, after converting to Roman Catholicism. Unfortunately, he was by then well into his seventies and too old to enjoy a second blooming such as that of his friend and hero Hardy. But there were in ...”