“... both grandfathers and his father were successful, well-regarded doctors. The physician’s white coat, as Stern writes, ‘was the one uniform of dignity to which Jews could aspire and in which they could feel a measure of authority and grateful acceptance’. Although medicine was in the 19th century, as it is today, far from a pure science, it held ...”

“... her fifties to be smitten with Skipper, a gay man eighteen years her junior. A good-looking, rich white Bahamian, Richard Roberts strung her along, joining in her flirtatious games, then swiftly offloaded her. Her sister Hilary told her to ‘grow up’, in other words, to give up.Byrne convinced me that Pym loved and ...”

“... the reader through the public furores – the outcry over her 1966 pronouncement that ‘the white race is the cancer of human history,’ for example, used as a cudgel against her by conservative foes until their arms went numb – and developments in her personal life familiar from previous biographies, memoirs and profiles. While not stinting on ...”

“... for some while now to admit to being bored by the huge, flat, ‘pure’ abstracts on the white walls of the museums of modern art. And yet non-representational paintings on a fairly large scale seem still to be what art students are most encouraged to make. Critics now incline to applaud in them evidence of a strenously physical relationship with ...”

“... into Magic’s young chin and Doc’s screams of ‘foul’ were interrupted by the sight of a White House adviser about to break open a vial of cocaine. Doc slapped me on the shoulder and muttered ‘Jeeesus’ – a sure sign of impending doom. Doc always sees things before anyone else. As Magic picked himself up off the court, Doc first glanced quickly ...”

“... First Iraq War veteran and freshman senator from Iowa. Cotton is widely considered the Great White Hope of the party. Running for the Senate, he revealed that ‘groups like the Islamic State collaborate with drug cartels in Mexico, who have clearly shown they’re willing to expand outside the drug trade into human trafficking and potentially even ...”

“... In Pushkin’s introduction to Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, which is included in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of Pushkin’s prose, a friend of the deceased (fictional) writer, a neighbouring squire, says that after his death Belkin’s housekeeper ‘sealed all of her cottage windows with the first part of a ...”

“... He has also gained from the release of translator’s notes of the Vienna summit in 1961, from White House conversations taped by Kennedy (years before Nixon), and from the records of conferences on the Cuban missile crisis held in the late Eighties, which included key participants like Rusk, Bundy, McNamara, Gromyko and Dobrynin. He is therefore able to ...”

“... what to do with all the recurring figures, the CRO-riddle, Bucephalus the (s)talking horse, the white (shaggy?) dog, the valise that survives into the SF future, the polygraph. Any one of them might lead to the heart of the matter. Take the last. It comes up three times, first in ‘Pascal’: Jefferson is so beside himself with glee that he finishes off a ...”

“... she needed to. In addition to the stories and novels she wrote poetry, and a biography of T.H. White. She also translated Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve, was a devoted correspondent, and kept a diary running to 38 volumes. More surprisingly, she was a musicologist of considerable importance, as well as a knowledgeable gardener and a resourceful cook. Since ...”

“... of a theory to be found readily enough, in several forms, as in Stevens, Empson, Blackmur, and Richard Poirier. Poirier’s A World Elsewhere is a typology of American literature consistent with the acceptance of Emerson as its prophet. Empson didn’t write a theory of American literature, but he thought James’s later style distinctively American in ...”

“... and park of circa 1700 in which we overhear a scene from Pamela, and then becomes a painting by Richard Wilson with figures from Peregrine Pickle. Thereafter we are led through Gainsborough’s Forest with a guest appearance by Sterne, Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a John Martin and a Turner, with snatches of poems by Wordsworth and ...”

“... Ionce​ asked the great historian Richard Southern whether he would like to have met any of the medieval saints and churchmen about whom he wrote so eloquently. He gave a cautious reply: ‘I think they probably had very bad breath.’ He may have been right about that, but it would be wrong to infer that this was something which didn’t bother them ...”

“... of writing from the US that the then editor Bill Buford labelled ‘dirty realism’, taking in Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Bobbi Ann Mason and so on), has always belonged to her and her alone. ‘For me,’ she has written, this ‘no man’s land, a deeply specific isolation drenched in family stories and secrets, is a huge advantage for a ...”

“... just over the house, ‘the noise of the machine gun . . . deafening’, and the ‘once white parachute, spattered with blood’ lying in the field next door with a dead German pilot beneath it. ‘I do think of you all each night,’ wrote Waveney the same month, ‘and wonder which of us is getting it.’ Her husband, Maurice, was a prisoner of ...”