“... ever think to say). ‘It isn’t so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember,’ Mark Twain remarked in later life, ‘as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so.’ Life is so full of wild incongruities and strangeness, of alternate realities. Why not go ahead and suspend disbelief; anything is possible. At the same ...”

“... in the press. In 1890, George Kennan gave a shocking account of the Siberian exile system, leading Mark Twain to announce that ‘if such a government cannot be overthrown otherwise than by dynamite, then thank God for dynamite.’As a young man, Serge drifted into the Parisian anarchist underworld, known for its campaign of bombings and assassinations ...”

“... A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly English humour’ too. He was too near academe to be a cracker-barrel philosopher. His style was zestful, easy and lucid, free from tags and ...”

“... Hemingway who struggled with his parents and killed them off in various fictional displacements. Mark Twain did it too. So did J.D. Salinger and Philip Roth. Popular American fiction is full of adolescent crises: of good-bad boys running away from home, escaping one form of captivity only to wind up in another as suitable cases for treatment. It is not ...”

“... Joan found an impressive galaxy of admirers abroad, as multifarious as Southey and Coleridge, Mark Twain and Bernard Shaw. It was inevitable that she should find her way onto the stage, and, with Gounod, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, into grand opera. This might have been thought the grand finale of her death-and-transfiguration, but there was still another ...”

“... sounds to its prosaic counterpart: the distinctively American vernacular prose style developed by Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and company. The absence of historical depth is also evident where Pritchard is at his best: in his sensitive discussion of Frost’s most admired and distinctive poems, the pastoral lyrics. (The working title for North of Boston ...”

“... get a needle into her worn-out veins. She died that day. Ari said that she had put a volume of Mark Twain in her pocket before she set out. In the version of the story in which the couple found her, she was clutching a book by Oscar ...”

“... distinction Frege had drawn between their sense and reference (the difference between saying that Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn and saying that Samuel Clemens did – Clemens was Twain’s real name – where the sense, the cognitive significance, is different but the reference is the same); a great will, too, to ...”

“... unsound. We have, however, heard all this, or something rather like it, before. To paraphrase Mark Twain, everyone has complained about Freudian theory but no one has done anything about it. Bloodied but unbowed by a century of critique, the Freudian outlook continues to be taught in our classrooms and applied in our clinics. Though they have ...”

“... a seismographic intelligence. Like Kinglake and Evelyn Waugh, he resorted to comic hyperbole; like Mark Twain, he dramatised his disenchantments and was a great one for sweeping half-facetious generalisation: Greece was a fraud, Poland dreary, Australia a bore, Japan primitive, Java a ‘disappointment’, India ‘a huge nightmare, with cobras and ...”

“... in Paris in 1868 after a whirlwind career not short on literary friends, among them Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Dumas père (to the dismay of ditto fils) and Dickens. She satisfied Swinburne’s longing for ‘Our Lady of Pain’, though the poet confided to Edmund Gosse that she was deficient as a lover, in that she tended to wake early and recite her ...”

“... his regime around regular mealtimes and early nights, re-creating in his apartment on St Mark’s Place the squalor of the nursery.’ And one last, summary example: ‘Auden’s rebarbativeness, which became progressively fouler and nastier over the years, was the sign of his refusal to allow himself to feel at home anywhere. Prizing his own ...”

“... performer, painter and publisher, was so honoured, along with a catalogue of deceased luminaries: Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Isadora Duncan, Dashiell Hammett, Kenneth Rexroth and Jack Kerouac. Via Ferlinghetti, formerly known as Price Row, is a dead-end off Union Street in San Francisco. It was dedicated on 24 April 1994 in a ceremony attended by ...”

“... misuse of the mind that makes it an enemy of life’. ‘That misuse is a distinctive mark of our scientifico-industrial civilisation.’ Lawrence is rescuing life from ‘inner mechanisation’, and Leavis is with him on the mission. We live in ‘a world of mass democracy, statistical truths and computers that can write poems’. The pejorative ...”

“... but in Switzerland were endemic in more than 80 per cent of the country. It was a curse that had a mark: the goitre, a bulge of flesh protruding from the front of the neck, sometimes so large that it weighed on the windpipe, giving bearers a characteristic wheeze. It was often disguised by collars and high necklines, but its true extent is laid bare by ...”