“... into a description of the poems he hopes to write in the future, which include an epic on King Arthur. A Latinist as good as Milton might remind us (though his editors curiously do not) that the single usage of ‘turgidulus’ in classical poetry means something like ‘welling up with tears’ rather than ‘turgid with self-regard’. But once that ...”

“... in at 560 pages. Merrill also wrote novels, plays and two memoirs. Born to enormous wealth, he had little to distract him from his writing apart from endless rounds of socialising and travel. His father was Charles ‘Good-time Charlie’ Merrill, cofounder of Merrill Lynch, who earned his moniker through prodigious accumulation of money and women. James ...”

“... campaign fundraiser for HRC. (Don’t ask, don’t tell.) Yes: Her Herness Herself! A friendly little plush-covered gathering for six hundred at some well-connected Palo Alto dweller’s farcically supersized manse! The next best thing to a private audience with the Hilldebeest! The Many-Horned Hillaria! (Bernie who?) Hellza-poppin’ H-Rod! (Not the ...”

“... Black draws on the work of pioneering scholars such as William Leuchtenburg, Frank Freidel and Arthur Schlesinger, but he also incorporates a large amount of original material from the Roosevelt Library. And although Black credits a number of research assistants, the argument bears his personal stamp. For FDR, somewhat improbably, turns out to be his great ...”

“... verse translation of Homer before 1598 would have made Homer, or anyone with an ear, groan. Arthur Hall, from Grantham in Lincolnshire, had trundled out ten books of the Iliad in flat, heavy fourteeners in 1581. Hall did not work from the Greek, or even from the Latin, but from Hugues Salel’s French translation, which was in turn translated from a ...”

“... Sixties, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. Jewish intellectuals paid it little attention. No monuments or tributes marked the event. On the contrary, major Jewish organisations opposed such a memorialisation.Fear of alienating Gentiles by emphasising the distinctiveness of Jewish experience was always a problem for American (as well ...”

“... alone in a London park for two hours during their elopement while he called on the critic Arthur Symons. ‘She thought he would not return,’ Ellmann says. Empson considered it a libel on Nora’s character to imply that she ran away with a man of whom she could think so dimly, and he was not persuaded when he tracked down the source in the ...”

“... closed off by her security men. I see a couple of proprietorial Russians trying to ferry Arthur Miller to the graveside. Squeezing past, he steps apologetically on our toes in one direction and then again in the other direction – but gets no nearer the epicentre represented by Yevtushenko and the television cameras. Yevtushenko introduces each ...”

“... in an Irish lunatic asylum’; after 13 years the wife died and she could at last marry him. It is little wonder that she was interested in bigamy. There is a good deal of bad behaviour recorded in these pages: Froude’s father buying up from the bookshops and destroying his son’s slightly scandalous Shadows of the Clouds (1847); Bulwer-Lytton having his ...”

“... the generation of younger Anglophone philosophers benefiting from the work of Walter Kaufmann and Arthur Danto. Anyone at all interested in Nietzsche will certainly want to read it. Nehamas’s reading of Nietzsche is, however, an example of a more general method of literary and philosophical interpretation which he has worked out independently. In ‘The ...”

“... word, there has been radio and tape since. But this is a regretful aside, which appears to have little bearing on a series evidently designed for the use of students of academic Eng Lit. Williams has worked out a guarded compromise, and briefed his team of specialists to select three themes they think important (affecting ‘writing of a certain ...”

“... were patriotic, and used the revolution ‘as a useful cloak for the settling of scores that had little to do with ideas of nationalism or “the nation”’. In fact, Foster, in his introduction to Vivid Faces, questions whether the Rising and the War of Independence together constituted a revolution at all, ‘in the generally accepted meaning of the ...”

“... about his physical defects. ‘My dear, you keep on stressing, as often as you can, how precious little I am and have, how many things make me unsuitable to belong to you … Have you got so much to give, so infinitely much … that everyone else is a beggar by comparison?! Exchanging love for love, that’s all I know.’ Exchanging love for love was not ...”

“... not just because they were considerably cheaper, which of course they were, but because one had little sense of being exploited. Now as I pay my water bills for instance, I think of their overpaid executives and the shareholders to whom the profits go and I know, despite the assurances of all such companies, that they are charging what they know they can ...”

“... in 1932) says, ‘and the money we earned went towards Christmas. And it meant we could afford little luxuries like soap and flannels. We were outside in the sunshine all day, singing, putting the hops in big bins made of sacking.’ Kath Crawley remembers going picking and being thrown into the Yalding River by the Kray twins: ‘They were boisterous kids ...”