“... Ancient initiation rites and schizophrenic delusions. Freud, of course, but also Bergson, William James and Count Keyserling. Mandalas, yoga and the I Ching, plus warnings to the Western mind about becoming too deeply immersed in Eastern practices. Archetypes, psychological types and, regrettably, racial types. Wotan until the reader is woozy. And we ...”

“... of the poem suggests a quite dissimilar literary world, toughly at ease with its own brutalities. William Pritchard has written well on the vivacity the younger Larkin learned (with Auden, it has to be added, as a forerunner) from the playful rhythms and rememberable idioms of dance-music lyrics. His cool plotting and harshly humorous caricatures seem to me ...”

“... finished a screenplay, quite a good one, about the body-snatchers Burke and Hare. His friend William Empson remembered him speaking in detail about a film he wanted to make about the life of Dickens, ‘very profound and very box office’, as Empson remembered it, adding loyally: ‘If Dylan had lived a normal span of life it would have been likely to ...”

“... poses – and mapped out the habits of her subjects in lively detail. Despite the best efforts of Christian missionaries, Mead found American norms inverted in Samoa: there was no such thing as romantic love, adolescence was a smooth passage, virginity was not prized, premarital sex prevailed, there was something approaching no-fault divorce, and everybody ...”

“... had its adversaries: members of Reagan’s brains trust, meeting in 1980, declared it less Christian than Communist. ‘US policy,’ they said, ‘must begin to counter (not react against) . . . the "liberation theology” clergy.’ Aristide’s elevation from slum priest to presidential candidate took place against a background of right-wing death ...”

“... Edinburgh spinster called Christina Stewart bought land in Morvern, a peninsula south-west of Fort William, from the Duke of Argyll’s estates and soon afterwards evicted 135 people from their smallholdings to make way for two large sheep farms. Nothing suggests Miss Stewart ever visited Morvern or met her tenants, who resettled in Glasgow and became ...”

“... was the only Jewish household on their street – and after their marriage, Tress converted to Christian Science as a kind of halfway house. Newman thought his mother saw him as ‘a weapon of her Catholicism to be paraded in front of my father’s people as the royal vindication of her own family, her smartness, her genes’. He told Stern that he ...”

“... in New York earned just $1.12 a week, even lower than factory work.A pill compounder called Dr William Evans had premises on her street. Evans sold pills for everything from constipation to ‘low spirits’ to ‘hypochondriacism’ (this seems an especially clever wheeze). Evans has an air of Doctor Dulcamara in Donizetti’s 1832 opera L’Elisir ...”

“... mess, was the prime mover behind her thought. At seventeen, she explained her refusal to become a Christian: ‘It is hard for me to give up the world.’ To subjugate the present to the promise of everlasting life – even if salvation were plausible – was, for her, a dull prospect. But she needed to keep the idea in play, just as the ghost of hymn metre ...”

“... you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific, said he was the greatest soldier in American history. Never much regarded in Britain, he is still recalled with loathing in Australia. When Americans remember him, it is with something close to ...”

“... time he deals almost too fully with the troubles of Eliot’s first marriage (compared, say, with William Empson’s very different, idiosyncratic but suggestive analysis of the filial Eliot at the period of The Waste Land) in no way affects this position. Hastings, too, takes as his subject the private life and yet gives us, as both condition and ...”

“... years.One example is McGurl’s discussion of ‘meta-slave narrative’, a genre illustrated by William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), the first-person novelisation of a historical account left by a rebel slave awaiting execution. By ‘refusing the perspectival limitations imposed by his own whiteness,’ McGurl claims, Styron’s novel ...”

“... of Mark Twain (Pudd’nhead Wilson), James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), William Faulkner (Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, Go down, Moses) and Nella Larsen (Passing) – all of whom examined the meaning of American freedom as flight across the colour line. Like his predecessors, Ellison was entering the culturally charged ...”

“... unfit genes? Faith in spontaneous progress denies more than the labour of a creation-minded Christian God. There are, thus, two rather different directions in which we may be pushed by the Darwinian view of progress. One suggests genetic manipulation, and the other indicates inactive reliance on spontaneity. The common element is, of course, silence on ...”

“... a motoring journalist who hates ‘CND lesbians’ can come at you with the moral authority of William Hazlitt. Last year a petition was handed in to Downing Street demanding that Clarkson be made prime minister: it had 49,500 signatures. It is not easy to think of a time when the British car industry was not in a state of some kind: a state of ...”