“... that ‘there is some connection between Burns’s “Vision” and the vision of Boethius.’ James Kinsley’s encyclopedic Oxford edition of the poems and songs has traced this connection, in its assessment of sources for the work. The supernatural devices of Pope’s Rape of the Lock are employed; the division of the poem into sections called Duans ...”

“... club, Summertown Stars, and sent me to the local Church of England school, St Philip and St James. I was already a competitive, sport-obsessed child, and responded to the sense of cultural difference by exaggerating it. During a classroom discussion – I can’t remember about what exactly – I quoted the great Green Bay Packers football coach, Vince ...”

“... behaviour often is, recalling the unfeelingness with which a later Prince of Wales, having met Mrs Simpson, briskly put aside his long-time mistress, Mrs Dudley-Ward. Sometimes it’s as if royalty know about good behaviour by hearsay and can only give a faulty imitation of it. Or as Willis remarks before meeting the King: ‘Deferred to, agreed ...”

“... begin his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and the FBI’s institutional linking of white supremacist and anti-Communist hysterias, to which America’s national police ...”

“... were Winstanley, Gow, Broad, Lapsley and at a later date Dennis Robertson and the egregious Simpson. Secateurs in hand, they moved in summer from snipping off the buds in the gardens in the morning to contemplating the lads in the town bathing place in the afternoon. This interest in good looks was hardly surprising. From the age of eight, the English ...”

“... following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter lack of decorum of any kind in his ...”

“... possible for immigrant Europeans – first the Irish and then the Jews – to pass. Rogin quotes James Baldwin: ‘No one was white before he/she came to America.’ It is customary to derive American movies from the low comedy and ethnic knockabout of late 19th-century vaudeville, as well as the mishmash of spectacular attractions that characterised staged ...”

“... things to burn. There is certain to be a great deal to feel shy about, but unless you’re Henry James, or somebody else fascinated by the idea of authorial control even after death, leavings are just leavings. You appoint literary executors in the hope that they will show good judgment. Notes to John exposes Didion and Dunne to the coarse explicitness they ...”

“... of the Nahlin, for instance, in 1936 when Duff Cooper and his wife accompanied the King and Mrs Simpson around the Mediterranean. Years ago Russell Harty had supper with Diana Cooper and she told him that she and her husband had had the adjoining cabin to the royal couple (or rather one royal, the other not) and that she had had her ear pressed to the wall ...”

“... in Proust. Sex? A Dance gives full measure to the place of desire in human life. Powell credited James with ‘forcing, almost single-handed, the English novel into the status of a work of art’, but remarked that there he fell short; even The Golden Bowl was limited by a ‘chronically inadequate understanding of sexual passion as an element in human ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... talks; normally he’d smoke through his lunch hour. He’s wearing long jean shorts and a Homer Simpson T-shirt; his eyes are ringed with yellow-blue shadows. ‘To be honest, this place takes so much out of me,’ he says. ‘It’s hard to pull away when I get home. I certainly swear at home more because I’m allowed to, but other than that ...”

“... asked to give his views on this and that. Thus we would have a ‘Letter from America’ by Louis Simpson or some such. So the Review had become more magazine-y than polemical. Something had gone, some genuineness, some verve. Some energy and commitment. It was time to jack it in. That would have been 1971 or 1972. Then I went to America for a year. No. It ...”

“... one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her bedroom that night clutching his ...”