“... which the sheer volume and variousness of his writing anyway make difficult. Fortunately, Lewis Dabney appears to be a man of firm purpose. Dabney wrote his PhD on Wilson more than forty years ago, and has been gathering biographical material for decades. Along the way he has contributed to Wilsoniana by editing The Portable Edmund Wilson (1983), the ...”

“... in innate wickedness works better than vague talk about inheritance or exposure.The poet C. Day Lewis, in his guise as Nicholas Blake, once said that writing detective stories was a harmless release of a spring of cruelty innate in everyone. One reason for seeing the genre as a form of comedy is its insistence that harmlessness, cruelty and comic detachment ...”

“... a Post-Modern novelist, critic, political theorist, and privy adviser to the world’s great men. Roger Scruton has done the eminent Doctor for Frank Kermode’s ‘Modern Masters’. Alas, Criminale reflects no credit on that worthy series. He is revealed as the most treasonable of clerks, a compound of Waldheim, de Man, Harry Lime and ...”

“... An epigraph to the screenplay of True Romance, attributed to ‘French critics on the films of Roger Corman’, says: ‘His films are a desperate cry from the heart of a grotesque fast-food culture.’ In Tarantino the cry is not desperate, and his characters are capable of quoting this line as a joke. In Natural Born Killers a pretentious film director ...”

“... indeed, his make-up) distinguished him from contemporary rockabilly dudes like Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins. He found an obvious joy in the staged act of seduction: the body does brazen, while the face remains convincingly bashful. Pamela Clarke Keogh’s Elvis: The Man. The Life. The Legend (2004) is mostly what you’d expect from ...”

“... on it). Less commonly, marital infidelity was implicated. It was well known in the service that Roger Hollis’s secretary was also his mistress. When Hollis was director general, from 1956 to 1965, the first serial, or memo, seen by the night duty officer at MI5’s Curzon Street headquarters read: ‘Should the DG’s wife call, say one of the following ...”

“... was that Sickert must have been ‘grown up’ by the late 1890s and was fibbing (Bell and Roger Fry both took a schoolmasterly tone with Sickert, who would not quite fall in with their conception of things). But perhaps Sickert did know what he was talking about. While he may have decided post facto that he became ‘literary’ in opposition to ...”

“... to be let alone.Two instances illustrate this to perfection, and both involve his friend and ally Lewis Namier. In the Salmagundi interview, Berlin said of the problem of assimilation:Sir Lewis Namier explained this extremely clearly. He said that Eastern European Judaism was a frozen mass until the rays of the Western ...”

“... in the world at large, came to the Faculty in São Paulo: Lévi-Strauss, Braudel, Pierre Monbeig, Roger Bastide, Claude Lefort, Michel Foucault. The deepest local imprint was left in philosophy, where a set of outstanding instructors trained a generation of thinkers, vividly memorialised in a recent work by Paulo Eduardo Arantes as Um Departamento Francês de ...”