“... loss of her daughter – that fixed her reputation.I never met Didion or her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, but in September 1974 I heard Didion speak one evening in the Branford College common room at Yale. Dunne was there as well, stepping in when her voice began to trail off. I was teaching a non-fiction seminar on Wednesday evenings that year ...”

“... and editors. Other leading figures also do both, including, in this country, Christopher Ricks and John Carey. But most critics in good repute don’t seem to want to edit, and wouldn’t be any good if they tried. The provocative element in McGann’s position for them will be his serious belief in the centrality of the role of the editor. He goes back to the ...”

“... against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business,’ Trollope said of the anti-slavery MP John Bright, a theatrical orator who couldn’t be bothered with political detail. Celebrating the Civil War as a triumph of freedom over slavery is equally easy. A few decades ago, US historians tried to complicate this heroic narrative. Guided at times by ...”

“... viewed with dismay the lack of restraint and caution in O’Donovan Rossa’s violent rhetoric. John Devoy, one of the leaders of Clan na Gael, the main Irish nationalist organisation in America, believed, as Kenna writes, that O’Donovan Rossa ‘had given the British ample warning of his plans through a desire for notoriety and theatricality, thus ...”

“... his essay is full of admiration, and shows a deep acquaintance with his works. The critic Gerhard Joseph once suggested that Auden might have had in mind the old sense of ‘stupid’ as ‘stunned’ or ‘benumbed’ – as when Satan in Paradise Lost, momentarily struck as he gazes upon Eve, stands ‘Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed’. It was not ...”

“... crisis he used threats and lies to coerce the press into co-operation. His fixer, the sinister Joseph Ball, had the telephones of the anti-appeasement MPs tapped. When Eden resigned as foreign secretary in February 1938, Ball put it about that the real reason was that he was exhausted and could no longer cope with the job. Chamberlain founded the ...”

“... seemed to me quite like what you’re up to.GP: Did you ever come across another Peckham artist, John Latham?TP: Of course, of course, I know him well. Knew him well.GP: Did you talk to him much about books?TP: Like most artists I meet, we talked about money, women, publishers, things that are wrong in the world, the Royal Academy.GP: But he never belonged ...”

“... The pogrom in Limerick, which took place in 1904, was incited by the fiery preaching of Father John Creagh to the arch-confraternity: The Jews came to Limerick apparently the most miserable tribe imaginable ... but now they had enriched themselves and could boast of very considerable house property in the city. Their rags have been exchanged for ...”

“... thought encompassed the notion of degeneration but not extinction.) Some naturalists, such as John Ray, simply admitted they didn’t have all the answers. John Woodward of Gresham College reconciled the Flood with the emergence of fossils by imagining a slurry of water and soil that deposited different objects ...”

“... comfort, but a lot of it very attractive. I came to the reviews with no expert knowledge of what John Sutherland calls ‘the fiction industry’ and ‘the reviewing establishment’. His two excellent books, Fiction and the Fiction Industry (1978) and the recently published Best-Sellers *, have helped me greatly.Other People was published on 5 ...”

“... between the good and the bad’, down to 1945, and the deployment of iron curtains by both Joseph Goebbels and the CIA director Allen Dulles. My favourites are the accounts of what delegations from the Labour Party to the USSR were shown: they usually lapped everything up, putting down shortcomings as ‘cost of revolution’ on the ‘great ...”

“... Middlesbrough, where the Tees was deeper. The extension opened in December 1830. Edward’s son, Joseph, led a Quaker consortium in buying up the land and began to look for investors. He approached Henry Bolckow, a Mecklenburg-born corn tycoon and his English iron-maker business partner, John Vaughan, who opened ironworks ...”

“... from dead ancestors, burlesque (‘as I neared my pudenda, it seemed that it was no longer me but John Indian who was caressing me … a pungent tidal wave flooded my thighs’) and an imagined meeting between Tituba and Hester Prynne. Condé describes the book as ‘the opposite of a historical novel. I was not interested at all in what her real life could ...”

“... confidently say what tone they themselves would have adopted. But even twenty years later, when Joseph Heller’s ‘unedifying tale’ of the Italian campaign, Catch-22, first appeared, the TLS thought it helpful to warn that there is ‘no shadow of nobility’ in Yossarian’s behaviour, as if this were something the author might have wanted to correct ...”

“... on foreign trade far advanced, Britain’s government should have seized hold of the economy as Joseph Chamberlain urged – controlling imports, using tariff proceeds to finance welfare and sustain home employment and incomes. In short, there is a case for economic management, as then espoused by an element of the Conservative Party and now by ...”