“... so, despite the succeeding flurry of anti-sweatshop publicity, in which Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich also took part, it came as no surprise that, a year later, New York labour officials raided a sweatshop (producing Kathie Lee Gifford and other lines) that was paying workers less than the minimum wage. The garment industry’s darkest days are being ...”

“... blurbs, and not only from other writers. He figures on Granta’s list of the ‘Twenty Best Young American Novelists’. The Spokanes were ‘a salmon tribe before they put those dams on the river’, fisherfolk living in settled villages. Most of Alexie’s work is set on their reservation in eastern Washington State, and what’s most alive in that ...”

“... that cannot be done on two wheels. On the last page of this opulent book is a photograph of the Young Theatre of Riga performing Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich on bicycles. We are not told what the critics said about this event. Was it an experience to lift the soul on wings, a mind-blowing epiphany? Or was it in the same class as a file of ...”

“... once saw Eric as the ideal baptismal name, to the ultimate dismay of its recipients. Of Eric Gill, Robert Speaight says that being called Eric ‘might not unfairly be described as starting life with a handicap’. The Great War showed what handicapped Erics were made of; in 1918 my cousin Eric, up from Biggin Hill in a two-seater fighter, overhauled ...”

“... would come to resent Auden’s tendency always to think of him as he had when they were both young, as though he had never grown up, but Spender himself returned repeatedly to those days as though to some rite of passage. In World within World (1951), the memoir he published while still only in his early forties, Spender gives the encounter the force of ...”

“... It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever needed an eye surgeon (which she did not), and his mad ...”

“... in Beirut was blown up by explosives packed into a pick-up truck, killing 63 people, including Robert Ames, the CIA’s chief intelligence officer for the Middle East, whose severed hand still wearing his wedding ring was found floating a mile offshore. The Israelis and Americans demonised the perpetrators of these attacks but continued to underestimate ...”

“... had come to respect him as a Roman Catholic pacifist, a Nobel Prizeman speaking measured words to young idealists. We may have forgotten the work of his youth, the two post-war novels based on his experience of service with the German Army in Russia. The 22 stories in The Casualty were written in the immediately post-war period, 1946 to 1952, so that they are ...”

“... At some point​ in the mid-1960s, large numbers of ambitious young men in Britain and North America lost their enthusiasm for elite, male-only colleges. The prospect of spending three or four years in an exclusively masculine environment had diminishing appeal. The absence of women felt ‘unnatural’, ‘unhealthy’, and increasingly at odds with the social and professional worlds in which the sexes now mixed relatively freely ...”

“... of independence from political control. Unlike Trump, who tried to fire the former special counsel Robert Mueller, Biden has made no attempt to breach this norm. Federal convictions differ from state convictions in one further, striking way: as Debs learned, federal convicts can be pardoned by the president, while state prisoners can be pardoned only though a ...”

“... expected to know about. Who is Mary McCarthy writing for? Either the decidedly elderly or the very young might respond: the first because they can remember what she is talking about, if they knew those sections of American life; the second because it is a thrill to hear the sacred monster reminisce. The inbetweens can only remember with nostalgia her novels ...”

“... public reaction to the book has centred too narrowly on its slighting references to ex-colleagues. Robert Harris’s furious depiction of it (in the Independent on Sunday) as spluttering with ‘rage, malice, contempt and hatred’ is probably the extreme case. The memoirs of other premiers, Harris notes, have shown saintly restraint towards erstwhile ...”

“... vulgar utilitarians and then march off to found a rival church.’ Among the Luthers they placed Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins is the wunderkind of pre-Sixties American higher education. In fact, as Kerr foresaw, he may well be among the last of a type for a very long time. For about a hundred years, if not longer, American colleges and universities were ...”

“... Sisman is not usually taken in, least of all by unsubstantiated assertions from Taylor himself. Robert Cole’s book, The Traitor within the Gates, forms an instructive contrast. In his treatment of several episodes, Cole has placed his reliance on the authority of the autobiography. For example, he simply reiterates its hard-luck tale of how Taylor’s ...”

“... and those unwilling to look fools, widens. Lawrence Weschler’s life of the Californian artist Robert Irwin is the best description I know of why spending months deciding how to put two orange lines on an orange square, or why offering a strip of black tape round the skirting of a gallery as your contribution to an exhibition, could be ...”