“... been better off with an office job? Would Proust? I mean no disrespect to Roy Fuller in asking if Virginia Woolf is not a better novelist than him, or Rilke a better poet. But I feel the issue needs to be raised, because it is one that goes to the heart of this whole collection. Salutary and welcome though it is, it is perhaps in danger of assimilating Kafka ...”

“... says, I’m good on TV, which is what it takes. ‘Admittedly I lack the character and wisdom of Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. But the office itself ennobles.’ Mr Vidal works mostly in Italy, to avoid the fate of stay-at-home American writers, which is alcoholism, but he’s famous just the same, and also very rich, for the American public gives him ...”

“... John Henry. The year is 1996, and J. has been summoned with his fellow junketeers to Talcott, West Virginia, the supposed site of John Henry’s demise. This is where the United States Postal Service has chosen to launch the first of a series of stamps commemorating American folk heroes (the others are Paul Bunyan, Mighty Casey and Pecos Bill). According to ...”

“... the surveying of the boundary line that separates Pennsylvania and Delaware from Maryland and West Virginia. The location of the unnaturally straight line was arbitrarily (or at least abstractly) chosen, and Pynchon’s characters get into all kinds of scrapes as a result of the incongruity between the imaginary line they’re plotting and the physical land ...”

“... entirely due. Her doughty British biographer Andrew Wilson was the first to report that Margot Johnson, Highsmith’s New York agent, had actually engineered the upbeat dénouement, just as the book was on the verge of publication (Johnson thought – correctly – it might improve sales). Wilson’s surprise revelation ...”

“... beginnings to the position of headmistress of the select Madeira School for girls, in McLean, Virginia. She had married young and had two fine sons. She had kept her looks, and, apart from the occasional bout of depression or fatigue, her health. She was well respected in the academic world, was an active fund-raiser, and presented to the girls in her ...”

“... we discern the same features: ‘picturesque’ and ‘bizarre’. And this, I take it, is what Virginia de Araujo is girding at when she protests, on behalf of the poet she is translating, Carlos Drummond de Andrade: ‘His people are not gentle victims nor crazy bandits.’3 The people who speak Carlos Drummond’s Brazilian poems, or appear in them, are ...”

“... have been an invitation from Cosima and Richard Wagner to come to Bayreuth, or from T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to spend an afternoon at the offices of the Dial. It took me about two days to ascertain from various friends in New York and Paris that it was indeed genuine, and far less time than that to despatch my unconditional acceptance (this after learning ...”

“... to this precept: we need art so that we can see what we are seeing. On his way to the Hebrides, Dr Johnson pulled down the blind on what a future generation of writers would take for their subject-matter – wild, ‘romantic’ nature. Johnson, had he lived, would not have seen the point of Wordsworth’s ‘single ...”

“... outside the group. This kind of thinking has deep roots in American history. President Andrew Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 because in his view it discriminated against whites and privileged Blacks. The Act bestowed citizenship on all persons born in the US and endowed all persons with the same rights as whites with regard to ...”

“... his survey of how countries attempt to deal with historical injustices on a portentous note: ‘Virginia Woolf might have said that on or about 5 March 1997, world morality – not to say, human nature – changed.’ Woolf’s often-quoted line referred to a Post-Impressionist art exhibition organised by her friend Roger Fry in December 1910. Barkan’s ...”

“... end, merely astral, that they were, though briefly, lovers a reasonable inference made long ago by Virginia Moore, and by Richard Ellmann, though his publisher seems to think Foster the first to make it securely. In the long run it matters less than the occult union, and less than Yeats’s sympathy in her marital misfortunes. There is nobility in his ...”

“... that he also chose (instead of ‘Twice President of the United States’) his authorship of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom. This last, which institutes the separation of church and state and prevents the establishment of any government-endorsed faith, is unlikely to have been dictated by an angel of any kind and thus leaves O’Brien’s analogy ...”

“... and Body’ is almost unique in allowing the body its say, in giving it in fact the last word. If Virginia Woolf is right that illness is one of the great neglected themes of literature – and the evidence from Enright’s literary anthology of illness suggests she is – it is probably because it is precisely in illness that the body gets to have its ...”

“... We are practically wiped out but we charged and took the Hun trenches yesterday. I stopped a Jack Johnson with my head, and my skull is slightly cracked. But I’m getting on splendidly. I did awfully well. Grenfell died slowly enough from the shell-splinter for his family to rush over and attend. His mother read him poems and Euripides’s Hippolytus, of ...”