“... had availed himself of some of those techniques in L’Étranger, whose deadpan style owed much to James Cain’s noir The Postman Always Rings Twice. Coming from a country where rationing was still in effect, he was unnerved by America’s enormous wealth, but even more unnerved by what struck him as its blissful amnesia: ‘This great country, calm and ...”

“... at the Sainte-Trinité: ‘Everything from the “devil” in the bass to Radio City Music Hall harmonies in the treble. Why the Church allows it during service is a mystery.’ In fact, Messiaen was forced to draft an apology for having shocked the ‘old ladies’ attending church. But ‘to those who bellow about my so-called dissonances’, he ...”

“... looking for Irish traditional music as an ingredient of his own musical recreation of [James] Joyce’s work, and when he was told that Joe Heaney was “the king of Irish music”, he pursued him to Norwich, where Joe was on tour, and swept him off to IRCAM’s prestigious base, the Centre Pompidou’.The remote​ west of Ireland, so used to ...”

“... the time she returned home her ‘path was set’, and she arranged to graduate early from Erasmus Hall High School (where her classmates included Neil Diamond and the chess champion Bobby Fischer, who dressed ‘like some sort of deranged pilot’). She worked backstage at a theatre in Greenwich Village, and through one of the actresses there met and began ...”

“... the allotted Uncle Tom role. This is why a young black woman identified with Marilyn Monroe. James Baldwin identified with her too, as he told Weatherby when he was introduced to him by Tennessee Williams. Not that Weatherby was the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of what might seem like odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s ...”

“... the literary level a similar puzzlement seems in order. What about the weird country depicted in James Kelman’s stories, for example, where demotic-proletarian saints find themselves forever knackered by sadist-authoritarian bullies or preached at in Malcolm Rifkind English by bien pensant hypocrites and child molesters? One easy answer now itself a form ...”

“... Adams would have subscribed to the view that ‘all men are created equal’ – but, as James Shapiro recently showed in Shakespeare in a Divided America, he also thought that Desdemona’s ‘fondling with Othello is disgusting’ and her passion for him ‘unnatural solely and exclusively because of his colour’. It would be convenient if such ...”

“... and his other interests, he became a spokesman on the tribulations of the Ovalteens. At the Albert Hall in 1949, he followed the Duke of Edinburgh and Clement Attlee in speaking at the Daily Mail Youth Forum – an audience of six thousand young people from around the world. He described himself as ‘a middle-aged old fogey’ (he was 46). ‘If Britain’s ...”

“... Caramanian Exile’ (which draws parallels between the British and Ottoman empires), or James Quinn on the travel memoirs and historical writing of the militant nationalist John Mitchel after he was transported to Bermuda, the reach of the British Empire matters as much as the comparative discussion. But Transitions is traditional in the way it ...”

“... in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with Nicolson. After Coats died in 1990, the diaries passed to Channon’s son, Paul, who died in 2007. Now, with the encouragement of his children, three formidable volumes have ...”

“... terms it was his starry apotheosis.Working the road in the 1930s and 1940s with the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey bands, Sinatra acquired a lot of jazz life knowledge by osmosis. (Jazz inflections peppered his speech for the rest of his life: ‘I’ve known discouragement, despair and all those other cats.’) He learned what not to do: how to hold ...”

“... Philosophy at Kingston University. (Gilroy too was Rose’s student before he moved to Stuart Hall in Birmingham. She was a ‘great’ teacher, he has said, and he followed her in dismissing the ‘ventriloquist structuralism’ that was in fashion at the time.)‘The Owl of Minerva has spread her wings,’ Rose wrote at the beginning of The Broken ...”

“... Under lowering skies, a thin line of mourners stretched silently outside the funeral hall. Barring the entrance, hulking riot police kept them waiting until assorted dignitaries – Anatoly Chubais, Nato envoys, an impotent ombudsman – had paid their respects. Eventually they were let in to view the corpse of the murdered woman, her forehead wrapped in the white ribbon of the Orthodox rite, her body, slight enough anyway, diminished by the flower-encrusted bier ...”

“... overlapped: I became fascinated, for example, with the long World War One sequence in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. I read up on butch lady ambulance-drivers at the Western Front. But the world had not yet retracted to a grey, dugout-sized, lobe-gripping monomania.Then, starting in my thirties, things seemed to intensify. I was in England ...”

“... language – Podhoretz’s writing is almost always elegantly phrased and supple, closer to Henry James than to Damon Runyon – that he likes to announce his lower-class affiliations. There is a pattern of such sartorial signals, running from childhood to maturity. In Ex-Friends, he is proud to report a sartorial victory for his class during an exchange of ...”