“... the Tea Party Movement, are ready and waiting in the corner to resume normal programming.) Oprah may have changed the status of black women in the media, but her trouble, a trouble she can’t quite dismiss, may put her a generation behind those heading for a truer Promised Land. The charge runs counter to the notion that ...”

“... Counts: Essays on the Writer’s Desk. (In it, there’s a chapter on Proust.) I also had, as you may have inferred, a thing for Isherwood – as a writer – in particular. (‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking,’ Goodbye to Berlin begins. ‘Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the ...”

“... but this was a parliament in which council members played leading roles. The king in council may not have been able to enact legislation but he could certainly make ordinances in areas of government such as foreign relations and control of the military, trade, printing, coinage and aliens. Over the following centuries, the council became a central part ...”

“... yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem Less gross than bodily; and of such hues As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes Spirits perceive his presence. In the picture as well ...”

“... a set of Eight Poems of Li-Po, dedicated hopefully (but in vain) to the silent film actress Anna May Wong, with whom he was distantly in love; and his most famous work, perhaps his only really famous work, The Rio Grande, is choral. Lloyd’s biography chronicles all this somewhat relentlessly, with frequent digressions into background information of ...”

“... characterises the almost cardiographic outpouring triggered by an exchange of letters. ‘How well may this writing Daily & to the moment, shew my beloved Susan and my Fredy [her sister Susanna and a friend, Frederica Lock] the present freedom of my Mind from agitation,’ she writes in an early passage. Later she speaks of offering ‘a window to my ...”

“... we can win here … In the end, we must enforce a principle whereby the only way the powerful may enjoy privacy is when it is the same kind shared by the ordinary: one enforced by the laws of nature, rather than the policies of man. Greenwald next saw some documents. His heart is always racing, he’s always plunging in, getting excited, and he’s always ...”

“... to the rich (top 20 per cent) and economic growth … the benefits do not trickle down.’ Last May, the OECD published a study entitled In It Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits All. All this makes it possible for us to talk about equality not only in terms of fairness, but also as the means to prosperity. The UK is deeply unequal and has an ...”

“... until the USSR acquired the Bomb in 1949. A world in which nuclear-armed states can be paired off may well be more stable than one in which they can’t. India and Pakistan engaged in four full-scale wars between 1947 and 1999. Since 1999 both countries have acquired nuclear arsenals and have managed to avoid war.After the breakdown of the Six-Party ...”

“... an epithet Ward tries out once and then discards – but a ‘Grand Monopoliser’ of wit. That may be too cynical, and it happened that Tonson’s most virulent critics in his lifetime were also his political enemies: diehard Tories like Ward or William Shippen, who first published Dryden’s nasty epigram, and portrayed the Kit-Cats in Faction Display’d ...”

“... mutually hostile zones. To speak, as Sumption does, of an ‘iron curtain’ partitioning France may be an exaggeration, but the geographical, legal, even psychological division of the country, which had always been difficult to unite, was not resolved for a long time. The city of Paris, which looms large throughout Sumption’s narrative, became intolerable ...”

“... themselves with heroin at the close of this one.’ As Andy Beckett observed in the LRB (10 May 2012), this sort of thing was new for Welsh, the beginning of a punt, maybe, at ‘the great Edinburgh novel’, though he doesn’t seem to have taken it further. And it sounds like a stretch, that ‘line from … the city’s global greatness, to the Aids ...”

“... word in the poem to ‘demon’ might lead us to prefer Hays’s version. But then with Brecht we may not want the theological dimension of Kafka’s claim, and if we’re in an atheistic mood, we can think he just means ‘very very bad’. In any case, the word certainly also means ‘angry’. The situation becomes more delicate when Rilke, in the ...”

“... of this second portrait shows that the fingers were painted over to loosen Gresham’s grip: ‘he may,’ according to the National Gallery, ‘have wished to appear less avaricious.’ The maxim attributed to him as Gresham’s Law – ‘Bad money drives out good’ – was a Victorian invention, but he did know a thing or two about finance. Still in his ...”

“... said this in an anonymous article; and we note that whatever the names, and whatever ‘outside’ may mean, there’s only one person doing the writing. Not the death of the author then, but as Adam Phillips shrewdly said in these pages (17 July 1997), we do see a writer who was ‘acutely aware of how the author got in the way of the writing’. Fernando ...”