“... a peripatetic time before settling, as a man does, for no apparent reason, in a hut among the reed-beds. He scratched out an existence making baskets; largely mute, pipe-smoking, he still does, with a hunchbacked and equally mute assistant. He married the illegitimate daughter of a ‘woman from the South’ who kept a bar on the canal, fathered by a ...”

“... were rarely positive, and were often savage. The high watermark for criticism was set early by Henry James, a friend of the family, who was sent the handwritten first draft of Fred’s Dodo. His response is a small masterpiece of positive restraint: I am such a fanatic myself on the subject of form, style, the evidence of intention and meditation, of ...”

“... the tone of the great masters of English eloquence: Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Emerson and Henry James. He brought, he wrote, ‘a special attitude’ to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral of Chartres, and to the Empire State Building . . . These were not really my creations; they did not contain my history; I might ...”

“... against the blackness of the night.’ When Wilde called him over, he sat down and began to play a reed flute. ‘He had an olive complexion; I admired the way his fingers held his flute, the slimness of his boyish figure, the slenderness of the bare legs that protruded from his billowing white shorts, one of the legs folding back and resting on the other ...”

“... and that we cannot always expect its intellectuals to approach us with the colonial cringe of Henry James or T.S. Eliot. Rorty made us realise how much poorer we are if Jefferson, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Stowe, Peirce, William James, Santayana and Dewey are not familiar landmarks in our intellectual scenery. And his devotion to the United States as the ...”

“... Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s ...”

“... The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they ...”