“... It was​ in the mid-1980s that the short seller James Chanos first realised he was being investigated. People were ‘going through my garbage’, he says. They didn’t find anything incriminating: Chanos lives a ‘nice quiet yuppie existence’, said one of the private investigators, whose report ended up in the hands of the Wall Street Journal ...”

“... Alice James died in London at the age of 43, regretting only that she would not have the pleasure of knowing and reporting herself dead. The reporting was done instead by her favourite brother: ‘I went to the window to let in a little more of the afternoon light, and when I went back to the bed she had drawn the breath that was not succeeded by another,’ Henry James wrote to their eldest brother, William, in America, as if, in the now fashionable way, defining death to a Martian ...”

“... Gibbon was made a member in 1774 and Adam Smith in 1775. The importance of other members, such as James Boswell and the pioneering linguistician William Jones, was recognised only posthumously. Alongside Johnson himself (and before one even gets to Garrick or Reynolds), their involvement supports Leo Damrosch’s claim that the Club brought together ...”

“... continue its upward climb beyond the reach of all but the most affluent. Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and other demagogues of the airwaves will continue to make out like bandits, while the millions of people who listen to them will only grow angrier and more depressed.Lazare’s predictions today seem understated. The ‘demagogues of the airwaves’ on Fox ...”

“... which armed crewmen could retreat in the event of an uprising. He takes us on a tour from stem to stern, from captain’s quarters to the levels below decks where slaves were incarcerated. He knows the crew and their tasks – the mates, carpenters, gunners and common sailors. And he knows how slaves were captured, transported and terrorised. The Slave Ship ...”

“... Western and gangster films would become anthology classics and whose personal mystique resembled James Agee’s without the all-night jags. When Warshow asks Podhoretz out to lunch, ‘I felt as a girl with a secret infatuation must feel when the boy she’s been mooning over asks her for a date.’ It was a compact beehive of brain industry and Podhoretz ...”

“... great, their affections were proportionate: they, perhaps, loved, where we only pity; and were stern and inexorable, where we are not merciful, but only irresolute.’ Imbued with refinement, modern civility and humanity, 18th-century man was ‘accustomed to think of the individual with compassion, seldom of the public with zeal’. Social ...”

“... looked capable of being nutmegged by a beachball.’ Of course that was twenty years ago, before stern charity and moderation of language became the name of the game. Amis likes games and seems especially keen on tennis and poker, but he spends more time on chess. He does what might by some be described as a ‘splendid job’ on Bobby Fischer, and a genial ...”

“... that you could ever understand the Holocaust with the mind,’ the Holocaust Museum’s architect, James Ingo Freed, has said. ‘You have to feel it.’ Such museums represent the Holocaust in exhaustive detail even as they insist that any true representation of it is impossible. Visitors are given a stern message: you must ...”

“... households – the goal is ‘familiarity without favouritism’. Ruth is placed with Martha, a stern woman she tries in vain to win over, first with jokes and then with stories of ‘the adorable behaviour of animals’. Families, too, are relocated from one Dorf to another: ‘Summonses to move appeared, like late library book notices and anonymous ...”

“... mutual attitude.’ Cool, Gladstone? A hater, Disraeli? According to his Victorian biographer James Anthony Froude, ‘in all his life he never hated anybody or anything.’ Between them Gladstone and Disraeli clocked up twenty years of prime-ministerial service – a third of Victoria’s long reign – and were both international celebrities. Disraeli ...”

“... word “vigil” suddenly presented itself.’ On this occasion he admitted that his idea of ‘a stern pilgrimage in which many trials of patience and courage would have to be met’ was a fantasy, and he frequently laughed at it. But it was a deadly serious matter too. When he arrived at the Channel he exclaimed in Holy Grail earnestness: ‘What I most ...”

“... a fashion among American writers, usually when resident in or recently returned from Europe. Henry James’s long list of negatives applied to Hawthorne’s America (‘no sovereign, no court ... no church, no clergy ... no palaces, no castles ... no Epsom nor Ascot’) is only the most famous instance of the trope. But competing with this theory of ...”

“... and open to hazard as those of the Tennessee sharecroppers described in the Thirties by James Agee in Let us now praise famous men. Other stories reveal small-town life as a hotbed of hypocrisy. Sexual relations are poisoned and poisonous everywhere from the farmstead to the gleaming suburb. And, bitterest of ironies, young men must die in defence ...”

“... lyricists who have violated his strict code on the way words should be put to music – as well as stern instructions on keeping your rhymes in order. The book builds a portrait of a cool, almost chilly master. He says he loves collaboration, but you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of his waspish principles. He is a wizard, but not a gentle or benign ...”