“... when they began an investigation into Robinson’s affairs. This was careless. Robinson had been close to Blair – the Prime Minister and First Lady took their children on holiday to his Tuscan villa – but by December, his loyalties were clearly with Brown. He had been all but finished by successive scandals. As his reputation was shredded, the Brownites ...”

“... influential a recipe’. And although he achieves this, it is almost at the cost of any kind of close reading of the novel itself. In fact, one of the curious things about Svengali’s Web is that Pick seems determined to persuade us that Trilby is not worth reading – except, that is, for the cultural history that a sufficiently informed reader can unpack ...”

“... all Koss’s talent as a herdsman. It is useless to read it unless the reader already has quite a close knowledge of British party-political history, or a general history of the period open at his or her elbow. Koss, as in his first volume about the rise of the Victorian political press, does not provide a narrative of events but only refers to them as he ...”

“... a precedent for Eisenstein’s 1930 fiasco with Dreiser in Erich Von Stroheim’s with McTeague by Frank Norris, made into the ten hours of Greed in 1923 and then cut (by a studio that had merged to become MGM) down to a quarter of its length. Greed was another depiction of American society and morals, and an extravagant work of ‘art!’, and so was bad ...”

“... the Cold War and whatever measures Washington decided were necessary to prosecute it, as well as a frank admirer of American capitalism (having made more cautious moves in this direction under the long editorship of Geoffrey Crowther between 1938 and 1956). In 1965, an article proclaimed the US ‘the most internationally responsible country in the ...”

“... defeated by the union block vote, until he became deputy leader shortly before his death thanks to Frank Cousins, the left-wing leader of the TGWU. His appointment to Attlee’s cabinet after the war can be seen as a concession to the party’s left. As editor of Labour’s house organ, Tribune, Bevan had become the left’s figurehead, and a more effective ...”

“... towards Shoreditch hooted. A distant alarm pulsed. Across a distance which could have been far or close came the tap of a stick, then a few footfalls which died away. That was the very last London fog. Children in Bow had to sleep in their classrooms. Thousands of empty cars were left blocking the North Circular. The Duchess of Kent was unable to reach her ...”

“... by white gravefields containing the remains, among thousands of others, of my great-uncle Frank and Kipling’s son Jack, though who can be sure exactly where they lie? (The identification of Jack’s grave in the cemetery at St Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station is still contested.) Twenty-five years before I went to Loos for the centenary of the ...”

“... legitimacy of the welfare state and the expectation of social progress. But the chapter began to close in the 1970s, with the end of the ‘golden years’ of boom or – as Judt proposes – with the 1973 publication in the West of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. (This is certainly original, but why exposure of the Soviet past should have effected the ...”

“... for instance (from the Dardanelles to Dakar, to Cologne, to Italy’s underbelly, to the murder of Frank Thompson), or Spender’s lachrymose sense that his (exceedingly brief) Communism had threatened to destroy his individual identity. But fairly promptly the CIA would import such heavy weaponry as Lionel Trilling, with his banging declarations that Western ...”

“... over the still stream,/Up the hill-side’) and so brings Keats’s poem to an unpremeditated close. Carver’s poem sets about capturing the quotidian and resists the charms of art, but ends up as art anyhow. Keats is no less self-conscious, but his poem works in almost the opposite way: he is wholly smitten with the charms of art (‘the viewless wings ...”

“... when Avedon got back to the US, his father was still alive, ready, as it were, for that final close-up. It was a story he had told before, I don’t doubt; it was neatly turned without being glib and, clearly, he enjoyed the effect it had on me, a complete stranger. But I also believe that it happened exactly as he told it. For days afterwards that pact ...”

“... She detested coarse language, which Twain had picked up in his knockabout youth. Nor did she like frank language, which was Twain’s stock in trade, and she was equally disturbed, perhaps even frightened, by Twain’s nose for the whiff of hypocrisy. He went for it immediately, much as a Jack Russell terrier would snap at the neck of a mewling kitten. Livy ...”

“... and the other poets of what would come to be known as the Black Mountain School, Duncan paid close mind to Olson’s injunction to ‘USE USE USE the process at all points.’ His distrust of revision was akin to a mystic’s antinomianism: the idea wasn’t to abandon form but to commit himself to ‘a faith in the voice’s telling that we ...”

“... and spiritual seekers who gathered around Emerson in the late 1830s in rural Concord.* At the close of that book, Fuller had begun her famous ‘Conversations’ for women in Boston, aimed at remedying ‘defects’ in her pupils’ education and encouraging them to think and speak for themselves. Under her guidance, the women analysed Greek myths, wrote ...”