“... interest is often key to the appearance of a writer’s work in another language; it may make their fortune: Anthea Bell (Englishing Sebald) and Ann Goldstein (voicing Elena Ferrante) propelled the authors to cult status beyond their own shores. Like a shrub moved to a sunnier position, writers may thrive when ...”

“... of that there sort of writing,’ he wrote to a friend, back in his home idiom again. ‘It may be bawdy – but is it not good English? it may be profligate – but is it not life, is it not the thing? – Could any man have written it – who has not lived in the world?’ Shelley, by contrast, entertained very ...”

“... said: ‘No, I haven’t.’ When the audience began to laugh, Armstrong beamed back at them. He may have appeared remote, but that scene, which appears in Moon Launch Live, shows how easily he could establish a rapport. ‘Silence is a Neil Armstrong answer,’ his wife, Janet, once said. ‘The word “no” is an argument.’ Also: ‘I’m not married to ...”

“... more than mere philosophical speculation in mind. The Enquiry was discussed by Pitt’s cabinet in May, but although the book might have been expected to encounter the full force of the law – as Paine’s similarly argued Rights of Man (1791) had done two years earlier – Godwin wasn’t prosecuted. ‘A three-guinea book could never do much harm among ...”

“... signal the intimation of half-thoughts, shadowy promptings of a kind that only a first-rate writer may catch in words. There is a scene early in The Shopworn Angel where he sits in a taxi beside Margaret Sullavan, a soldier accepting a lift from a posh woman, speaking softly partly because he is shy of her beauty but also because he feels in the wrong: she is ...”

“... of prose sketches that he first made his mark, when three pieces appeared in the English Review in May, June and August 1909. His literary career was thus one of several launched by the Review’s perceptive editor, Ford Madox Ford (or Hueffer, as he then was). Lewis is said either to have thrust his bundle of manuscripts wordlessly into Hueffer’s hands, or ...”

“... wasn’t rooted in the hostility towards women that seethes through the play. Jimmy Porter may rail against society, boring Sundays and the general peeling-wallpaper crappiness of postwar England, but it’s women who bear the brunt of his hyperarticulate, inchoate tantrums, women who embody and enforce the stultification of life; in particular, his ...”

“... his second, more narrowly focused, but equally instructive new book, The Saint-Napoléon. Readers may initially wonder if they have missed a Napoleon among the pantheon of Catholic saints, but no one had heard of him until 1805, when Napoleon asked the pope to canonise a new saint for his birthday. With Rome under the control of the French army, the pope ...”

“... than U-235), it is very unlikely that it could have made it small enough for missile delivery. It may be able to deliver a weapon from a plane, but given the air superiority of the US this is not a significant threat. Far more real is the DPRK’s ability to threaten a conventional artillery attack on Seoul, where more than ten million people live. This kind ...”

“... unfair. I had never had a spellbinding teacher like this and had had to make my own way, which may be one of the reasons I’ve been prompted to write such a teacher now. As the months passed I began to feel that since I could hold my own with these boys in Russian maybe I ought to have another shot at getting a scholarship myself. Besides I was at ...”

“... new Northern Ireland Assembly rejected a motion denouncing power-sharing by 44 votes to 28, on 14 May 1974, the Ulster Workers’ Council announced that the Loyalists would reduce electricity output. The next day they called a general strike, and roadblocks appeared everywhere. Trimble played a significant role in the organisation of the strike, and appears ...”

“... date of birth and Career of each speaker: he also knows who the speaker is at any given time. It may not have been so easy for the English listener to distinguish between the half-dozen American voices used for the Trilling programme. If this mosaic didn’t come over sharply it’s a pity, since it reads like a most accomplished piece of radio. The Wilson ...”

“... be as secure as ever, especially within and radiating out from academic circles: that is, if one may judge by the number of recent books, articles, monographs, studies, memoirs and so on listed in the Bibliography and Notes of this impressively thorough record of the life and work of one of the most disconcerting novelists in the history of fiction, whom ...”

“... spaces, its cathedral acoustic. If The Waves is somewhere in the background of Orbital, it may be as warning rather than model. It showed how easily lyricism can get clogged, with details becoming indistinguishable from abstractions, losing the power to animate a fiction. Harvey keeps things crisp and contained, her researched details (the way ...”

“... would not have been welcome even if he had delivered it on time, in person and in sobriety, and may have been devised to sting the austere, abstemious Liliane.On one gala occasion Ramón and Liliane failed their children simultaneously. At the Comédie-Française on 16 April 1942, during the interval of Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris, Dominique was looking ...”