“... to advertise their prospective clients in this way? Elsewhere among the crosses and headstones one may find Upton Sinclair, Nobel laureate and defeated Socialist candidate for the governorship of California, Alice Warfield Mien (mother of Wallis Simpson) and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, grande dame of Washington dynastic bitchery. (She had a motto emblazoned on ...”

“... fact begin at the beginning and contains no mention of the Judgment of Paris or the fatal Horse, may well have been the reaction of Homer’s original audience. Instead of adding on other episodes, Homer brings a magnifying glass to the tale and fills the time by deepening his characters, by realising more fully their imagined world, by broadening the ...”

“... garage in a small bay by the side of the road, on a dangerous bend. No sign, no indication of what may lie beyond it, but we know by now that it’s the only construction between Wilsford and Lake. And as we pile out, to stand under trees of an alarming height, I see the roof of the cottage my father went to so much unrewarded trouble to make. Thatch lies ...”

“... and the foundation of that structure was patronage, unprecedented in its scale and scope. He may well have been its biggest beneficiary. By mid-1923, Weaver had made gifts to a trust for Joyce amounting to £21,000 and he was earning £1050 per year. Contact with Pound and Weaver brought about another change. Joyce now had an audience, however small, and ...”

“... stupidity or cowardice to outsiders like myself – reporters from rich countries. Such reactions may be disguised, even for the purpose of deceiving oneself, but I believe they form the deep structure, the hidden wiring, the bias of Western reporting. Journalists may rail against a particular government, or the ...”

“... satirically named Madame Bourgeois, a Belgian heiress. He had no political base in the Commons and may have felt it politic to bankroll Blair’s closest ally. Mandelson did not declare his enormous loan, acquired on such preferential terms that it was a gift by any other name, in the register of MPs’ interests. The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry ...”

“... it, the theory then comes to stand in metaphorically for what it signifies. Political revolution may have many perils, but failing to concentrate the mind wonderfully is not among them. The endless digressions and self-interruptions of this study, as it meanders from Kant to Krishna, Schiller to Sati, belong, among other places, to a politically ...”

“... catalogued. His first sexual experience was, famously, at the hands of his Presbyterian nursemaid, May Gray, when he was nine years old. There followed exploits with his fellow Harrovians; the chorister Edleston at Cambridge; countless whores in London; sailors at Falmouth; boys in Albania and the ‘buggery shops’ of Constantinople; his servants (male and ...”

“... pleated gowns – in short, what Larkin once called ‘the shit in his shuttered château’. He may be a limited and biased reader of Woolf’s rousing, anti-Edwardian manifesto for the examination of consciousness in fiction, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, but the surly provincial in me – dare I say it, my inner Lawrence – can hardly help cheering ...”

“... Lynch Thrale Piozzi, marginal annotation to Boswell’s Life of Johnson Here is a museum. Visitors may see in it Nero’s couch, a statue of Cerberus and a skeleton of an Ethiopian, the bones stuck with porcupine quills. Here is a cabinet of curiosities. In it are a ribbon pretending to have belonged to Frances Thrale (dead in infancy) but in fact stolen from ...”

“... delicacy as the motive. We should at least explore the idea that decorum was involved: odd as it may seem to us now, death was deemed a private affair about which those who needed to know would know by other channels. The pathos of the dead family is real, but different from that seen in recent issues of the New York Times. What is it then that governs the ...”

“... of Yeats and critical studies of Orwell, Lawrence and T.S. Eliot. Bunting knew Yeats and Eliot; he may or may not have met Orwell. He truly detested Lawrence, first for locking him out on a window-ledge at a party (in Paris, I think) and then for slipping him some hashish baked into a pastry of some sort and not telling ...”

“... pleased with the accounts of your children. Perhaps the new generation in the next few years may lead to many acceptable recognitions when I am in the grave. Till I go, believe me Ella to be most affectionately Your W. Jerdan Jerdan died impoverished in 1869 in Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire, at the age of 88, leaving no will. I was told about the three ...”

“... reward. That is, MacArthur stakes a wager on potential: it is not what you have done, but what you may do, which is judged, or prejudged. ‘The kid will go far,’ is the message they send. Such prophecy is notoriously inaccurate. The MacArthur operation has not been going long enough for one to see how many out-and-out winners they have in fact chosen ...”

“... anything nowadays except the theory of science? His own answer to this question is affirmative. It may seem that the so-called ‘analytic’ tradition in philosophy – the tradition that goes back to Frege and Russell and whose most prominent living representatives are Quine, Davidson, Dummett and Putnam – must return a negative answer. For that tradition ...”