“... who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!’ is the way he described his spectral existence in his masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night. The dynamism which was transforming the geography of early 20th-century urban America was also changing the interior landscape of its ...”

“... era bordered on the ‘grotesque, and until that era is seen in truer perspective there can be little hope for a sophisticated US foreign policy concerning Iran.’ (Or the whole Middle East, Cottam could have added.) The New York Times summed up the new imperial mood immediately after the coup: ‘Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an ...”

“... on the rationalism of Descartes: ‘Cogito, ergo sum. Alas, poor Cogitator, this takes us but a little way.’ Science, including mathematics, and the evidence of the senses have their own value, but they cannot assist the Quest: only the Imagination, the sense of mystery and wonder can provide access to the underlying Truth. But neither philosophical ...”

“... close proximity of death that he thinks the market requires, and Kellas treats his text as little more than the springboard that will eventually launch him to a movie and video-game deal. The two books, call them Descent and Rising, have an odd, uneasy relationship with each other. On the one hand, the excerpts from Rising serve to call attention to ...”

“... of the Temple when the Terror was at its height, without experiencing certain qualms.’ Baron Arthur Léon Imbert de Saint Amand began his late 19th-century biography of Marie-Thérèse from a place of desolation. Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, Madame Royale, later Duchesse d’Angoulême was the first child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the sister ...”

“... broken-down actor of the type one meets in railway trains or boarding houses’. His battles are little studied professionally. Only those tireless tourists, the Japanese, regularly visit his tacky, Napoleon-sized mausoleum in Norfolk, Virginia, built as part of a murky property deal by a crooked mayor who was later murdered. We still don’t know what to ...”

“... composers, including Martial Solal, Paul Misraki and Georges Delerue. But there was sometimes so little dialogue that his assistants wondered what the actors were supposed to do. ‘On va dilater,’ he would tell them – ‘We’re going to stretch out’ – like a jazz musician discussing how to improvise on the basis of a sketch. According to Bernard ...”

“... for years, to tea … Wilde would sit in a high-backed armchair, stretching out one hand a little towards the blaze of the wood fire on the hearth and talking of the dullest possible things to Ford Madox Brown, who … sat on the other side of the fire in another high-backed chair and, stretching out towards the flames his other hand, disagreed usually ...”

“... Pocket Book of 1906. His Clark Lectures of 1953, his last sustained composition, showed how little two wars had affected his creed. He defended Scott as the great social historian who had made Carlyle and Macaulay possible, vindicated Shelley against Arnold, and preached a religion of poetry: ‘It is joy, joy in our inmost hearts. It is a passion like ...”

“... doomed Edith Granger becomes Mrs Dombey with no authorial word on what she is wearing (though the little girls watching from the street memorise her attire and dress up their dolls to match it). Dickens does, however, describe the bridegroom’s over-vivid outfit, and perhaps that will do for a warning. Hughes notes that Thackeray’s non-hero is similarly ...”

“... out to include tags such as hinc illae lachrymae. Such items of internal evidence are worth very little, as Furbank and Owens contend: but not all ‘phrases and stylistic tricks’ fall into the same category. The author of the 1715 pamphlet uses the phrase ‘Quondam Chancellor’ of exactly the same figure as does Oldmixon in pamphlets of the same ...”

“... strong for disliking the editors of the Times Literary Supplement (successively Alan Pryce-Jones, Arthur Crook and John Gross) and indeed held the whole London literary world in contempt as a self-serving clique. He became a lecturer in 1936, already over forty, and a full lecturer at 52. MacKillop deals with this scandalously slow ascent in great detail and ...”

“... falling far short of the standard set for the series by Renée Winegarten’s excellent little book on Madame de Stael. In so short a text, Gertrude’s involvement with the anti-suffragists hardly deserves a chapter to itself, while the intricacies of Mesopotamian politics, which she helped unravel, require more careful treatment.Nevertheless Ms ...”

“... all just ‘crackpot stuff’.After the trouble with the memoir, I tried to bring her out of it a little, and threw a dinner for her at the Café Loup on 13th Street. She was in one of her moods when she arrived and told me I was shallow for having asked so many intellectuals and snobs who didn’t talk the way she talked or see the world ‘plainly’. For ...”

“... political activities from the rest of his life is useful, though it is peculiar to hear so little of his other commitments. The Furbank and Owens narrative is certainly counter-literary. It ends in 1720, when Defoe, according to them, ‘turned his back on politics’. Robinson Crusoe apart, his novels are still to come. Richetti has some of the same ...”