“... that it remains a discipline more than an art.) During breaks from A la Recherche, Scott-Moncrieff took refuge in the altogether shorter and more urgent sentences of Stendhal, and in the plays of Pirandello. If he was drawn so greatly to Proust this may have been for technical rather than temperamental reasons, for he was not, by all accounts, a Proust-like ...”

“... in a sandstorm, croaking out: ‘Follow the money.’ Bernstein and Woodward’s subsequent story took months to run its course, requiring as it did double-sourcing, deep analysis, painstaking consultation with lawyers as to publishability, judicious interplay between ‘reporting’ and ‘editorialising’. What has made the change, of course, is the ...”

“... own kind of respectability. As distinctions and divisions crumbled in her imagination, her style took on an ever more compelling and more goblinesque accuracy. Her imagination had always centred less on Ireland than on the South Coast of England, where she had spent her girlhood, and in her last two novels place takes on a vividness at once hallucinatory and ...”

“... centuries, after which colonising the entire galaxy would be very much on the cards. Also that I took seriously Dyson’s vision of an infinitely prolonged future for our descendants. Even in something as concise as Imagined Worlds, a work of some two hundred pages with very few words per page, it is startling to find Dyson doing so little to explain this ...”

“... John Wieners​ once told his nephew he had met the Virgin Mary. ‘Did she say anything to you?’ Walter asked. ‘No,’ John said, ‘she doesn’t know how to speak.’ He paused. ‘But she’s learning.’ Wieners was born to a working-class family outside Boston in 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina ...”

“... Dollar bills, pound notes, they’re suicide notes. Money is a suicide note.’ So says John Self, the hero of Money: A Suicide Note, and what he means is that money is destroying him. Self-destruction (along with several of its hyphenated pals: indulgence, interest, loathing) has become Self’s hobby, what he does in his spare time, and what he spends his money on ...”

“... intellectual independence and a willingness to experiment among people like the Loshes who took ideas seriously and were inclined towards radicalism. Sarah’s father John, born in 1757, was the eldest of four remarkable brothers. Their wealth came partly from land and later from the alkali works the family developed ...”

“... suffered grievously from their detractors, but far worse from their worshippers. The awful Jane St John, who married Shelley’s son and established for her dead father-in-law a ghastly shrine at Bascombe, solved the ‘Claire problem’ by writing her out of the record. This almost permanent friend, sister and companion of Shelley and Mary during their eight ...”

“... inclinations while justifying the decision in his own moral terms. Nobody doubts that an attack took place. Nobody yet knows with reasonable certainty who ordered it. Assad had the ability but, since he was winning the war and such a move was plainly suicidal, his arrival at such a decision is hard to make sense of. The rebels are said to lack the ability ...”

“... was the story of a woman’s life as a house slave on the North Carolina plantation of John Hill Wheeler, her escape to New Jersey in 1857, and her composition of an autobiographical fiction incorporating ‘elements of the many sentimental sagas she had evidently borrowed from Mr Wheeler’s shelf’. Although ‘replete with the heavy-handed ...”

“... opened to ‘anyone who wished’ to see it, an occasion that coincided with the festivities of St John the Baptist, Florence’s patron saint, when the city put its richest treasures on view. For Vasari, the extraction of the David from a mangled block of marble was nothing short of a miracle; Michelangelo had succeeded in ‘bringing back to life one who was ...”

“... On a spring day​ in New York City in 1960, Grace Hartigan, then 38 years old, took the train uptown to visit Winston Price, a young scientist from Baltimore, and a new collector of her work. To anyone who saw her on the subway, she wouldn’t have looked like a painter; ‘when I go out,’ she said, ‘I’m all woman ...”

“... New York Sun ran a sensational scoop: the ‘Great Astronomical Discoveries, Lately Made by Sir John Herschel, L.L.D., F.R.S., &c, at the Cape of Good Hope’. Herschel – former president of the Royal Astronomical Society and son of William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus – had sailed from Britain to South Africa two years before with a giant ...”

“... of mind’, it must be a broad category indeed to contain two such different representatives as John Henry Newman and James Fitzjames Stephen. They shared a distrust of reform and democracy, a love of England, and a penchant for getting into controversy in print. Otherwise, they strike one as chalk and cheese, or ‘dog and fish’, as Newman put it, à ...”

“... a matter of natural and wholesome professional sympathies. Stella Tillyard is married to historian John Brewer who helped Schama with Citizens, as the author warmly acknowledges in the Introduction; and there is further scholarly harmony in the fact that Tillyard, in her Preface, shows that she agrees with the views of Schama, and, increasingly, others, about ...”