“... or when wrapped in a European reputation, such as Garbo’s or Dietrich’s. Citizen Kane may not have been the first film to break through this cloying curtain of snobbery, self-satisfaction and ignorant parochialism, but never had an American movie so brashly demonstrated that Hollywood could now no longer be a dirty word. Here at last was the ...”

“... in the Second World War he conquered his own nature and showed a sharp eye for an indiscretion. He may have recalled that, not once but twice between the wars, sigint was compromised by Conservatives. The first time, Curzon did so (the Times had no scruples about revealing it), and the Russians did not notice. The second time, Baldwin read out the contents of ...”

“... that the modes can’t be up to much if somebody else can take them over so easily. Be that as it may, it turns out that the three modes scarcely even begin to jibe, whereupon the awed Professor Booth gives forth plangent threnodies, of which the following is merely a sample: ‘Regardless of whether Ronald Crane finds any one sonnet or an entire sequence to ...”

“... photograph, while Abstract Expressionism, or whatever its equivalent in ongoing American poetry may be, continues its fissiparous course. Is Lowell the victim of what he himself called ‘the bravado of perpetual revolution, breakthrough as the stereotype, with nothing preserved’? That, in a sense, would be a fit end for a king, remaining embalmed in the ...”

“... audience, of a sort of conniving in his own cultishness, which they also dislike. Certainly they may complain that these two bits of prose, put together, boil down to no more than whimsy: for how can they apply, in one case, to a work of Science Fiction, and in the other to a collection of essays and speeches (especially as Vonnegut seems to be saying that ...”

“... Why should cattle be deprived of a calcium supplement? Cement dust, which is an oxide of calcium, may be just the thing: the US Department of Agriculture says a shovelful of cement dust in the trough produces a 30 per cent faster weight gain. There is a problem about delivering all this supercharged supplement to a beast with a digestive tract designed by ...”

“... money off kids in bars, grab at girls, shout ‘I’m Jack Kerouac, the world-famous author!’ He may now be the sort of writer whose life is just as well known as his writing. When I reached the area near Columbia University, I remembered that as a student young Kerouac had looked out of his Livingston Hall dormitory straight at a frieze on the side of the ...”

“... traditional’ works of fiction – ‘granny novels’. Who are these granny novelists? one may ask. Although it is free enough with the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns present at the Guildhall on the night of 16 October 1990, Bradbury’s novel is overcome with amnesia when it comes to the names of the half-dozen Hamlets at the centre of things or the ...”

“... few, Russian or foreign historians and journalists, some of whom are apt to exaggerate what they may have read. Others again are either closed or not even known to exist (it is clear that, all over Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, officials carried off bundles of documents to serve as an investment against an uncertain future). And, as Gaddis ...”

“... former biographies did – to bring Keats’s life and work again into visibility. Younger readers may first encounter here all the incomparable quotations (from Keats’s letters and poems, and from the papers of the Keats circle) that biographies of the poet must include. The effect of Keats’s brilliant prose is to make any reader love the book in which he ...”

“... birdwatcher who crossed paths with a white woman and her dog in Central Park on the morning of 25 May, the same day George Floyd was killed when a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for nine minutes. There are ‘white spaces’ in Central Park, and the Ramble, a wooded area popular with birdwatchers, is one of them. Cooper is 57 – almost ...”

“... a cordon sanitaire was thrown around Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in Hubei province. Hubei may not have been a familiar name to many people outside China. But it is squarely on the map of global investors: 9 per cent of China’s car industry – the largest in the world – is located there. While health experts struggled to get politicians to take ...”

“... were convicted of solicitation offences, with 2500 of them receiving prison sentences. The law may have struggled to find pimps guilty, but it had no difficulty in condemning female prostitutes.The journalist Guy Scholefield, who reported Harvey’s case for the New Zealand Evening Post, described her as an ‘unfortunate girl’ entrapped by dreams of ...”

“... a master of pastiche and invective. Thinks himself the biggest and best phoney of all time, and may be right!’ Anyone skilled as Thomas was at eliciting other people’s prejudices; anyone who can make people wonder so much about his own authenticity; anyone with what he himself called ‘the familiar Thomas puffed innocence’ would seem to be peculiarly ...”

“... Institutes and, though he was apparently free of Calvinist guilt, his moods of black depression may have owed something to that unforgiving literature. He was a rebellious boy, given to impish pranks and easily bored – both lifelong traits. After devising ways to hide drawing pins in the chairs of unsuspecting friends, and walking out of Dalhousie ...”