“... many people, he prides himself on describing things as they really are.As the Cold War drew to a close, his patience with politicians and writers of the left had begun to wear thin. The LRB, which appeared to be moving leftward (in reality, Britain had moved to the right), stayed with him, and tossed him some meaty bones, which he gnawed loudly, often ...”

“... movements as ‘characters’ in some of his fiction. How is this to be reconciled with the frank dominance of a single character – a male narrator – in each of the novels since Breakfast of Champions? Shortly after the author, as a character in this novel, has uttered his resolve to make every person exactly as important as any other he hears a ...”

“... said, as he turned the Shenandoah Valley into a wasteland of burned fields and ruined homesteads. Frank Vizetelly was in the neighbourhood, reporting and drawing (as he had been throughout the war) for the Illustrated London News. ‘The sight of emaciated women pleading with soldiers for bread to feed their children led him to accuse Union troops of ...”

“... tried it closer to home at least once. On 1 August 1939 Kathleen and her friend Julia Vickers met Frank Martin, who took them driving around Charleston, West Virginia in his grey Packard convertible. At Valley Bell Dairy he bought them cheese, and at Dan’s Beer Parlor he got them pints. Kathleen said they ought to rent a room somewhere; it would cost ...”

“... and having much in common with the easy, unshowy critical penetration of Watt’s contemporary Frank Kermode. But, as his intellectual trajectory suggests, considerable scholarly resources stood surety for this agreeable surface manner. As Watt reflected, his aim had been ‘to transcend what I had learned from the idealist modes of German thought by ...”

“... were the primary victims, especially but not exclusively in the relatively lawless west. After it, close to 75 per cent of lynchings were in the deep South; more than 90 per cent of the victims were black. There were other lynchings, of course: mobs murdered an unknown number of Mexicans – in the thousands – by hanging, burning and shooting, particularly ...”

“... real live specimens of the Protestant beast, they had initially followed the opinion of Loyola’s close colleague Pierre Favre that dealing with Protestants should be a matter of Christian witness, ‘speaking with them familiarly on those topics which we have in common and avoiding all contentious arguments in which one party might seem to beat the ...”

“... I’m its current biographer.’ With the publication of The Golden Age, the biography draws to a close. The novels which comprise it, to list them in order of the historical periods they cover, are Burr (1973), Lincoln (1984), 1876 (1976, of course), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1989), Washington, DC (1967) and now The Golden Age. According to Vidal’s ...”

“... Cream for firming the neck and bust’. Arden’s own salons were taking off, as women watched close-ups of heavily made-up stars in the cinema and decided, helped by advertising in glossy magazines and brilliant public relations, that the ‘mark of sex and sin’ was worth the price. By 1927 American women were buying 52,000 tons of cleansing ...”

“... fierce struggle to recover one’s self-respect.’ Her brother in turn had no great wish to live close to her, finding people more tolerable in recollection, or in art.One day​ he set out on a walk from the town (he was a good walker), made his way up the hill and along the Poole Road and eventually arrived at the villa at 63 Alum Chine Road, where he rang ...”

“... all discussion, indeed all thought, instantaneously. In the public imagination, terrorism was close to barbarism – a marriage sanctified by implicitly racist Islamophobia (the term is inadequate, since it focuses on fear to the exclusion of contempt and rage). The obsession with exterminating terrorists had calamitous consequences for US foreign ...”

“... about the sound: ‘strode’ in the same line as ‘patrol’, whose last syllable was too close to the ‘ode’ in ‘strode’. In other earlier versions, he had ‘the dismantled street’ rather than ‘the disfigured street’. And then Hayward suggested ‘the demolished street’. But ‘disfigured’ invoked the figure that had come and ...”

“... it emits fewer than nine tons of carbon per head a year, less than half America’s emissions, and close to the less heavily industrialised EU’s average of 8.5 tons. Japan gets more value out of the energy it does use, more cargo for the kilowatt, than anyone else, but by methods not everyone would accept, if they could postpone the pain by rejecting the ...”

“... His advisers were people he had promoted. Generals who had expressed divergent opinions in ‘frank and informal get-togethers’ had been retired. His political allies were worried that their opportunities to enrich themselves even further would be curtailed if they had to share power with Benazir. What if the Supreme Court were now to declare his ...”

“... her influence seems very local, mostly confined to the New York poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara or the writing of Andy Warhol, though in fact so much of Hemingway’s manner of writing – the short, paratactic sentences, the use of repetition, the idea of removing the obvious subject – was taken from her, so the whole sequence of writers ...”