“... When her mother, Mary Kate, drew the talent of her daughter to the attention of Katherine Miller, a white woman for whom she cleaned house, Simone found her first patron. Miller paid for the piano lessons which the Waymon family couldn’t afford and steered the child at the age of five to Muriel Mazzanovich ...”

“... to get away from her mother – they share a room – and spies an escape route in Master John Edes, a mild-mannered shipping clerk who has been teaching her to read the gospel. But Edes is an associate of a sinister newcomer called Matthew Hopkins, who is on a mission to root out witchcraft. In wartime Manningtree, Puritan fervour is running ...”

“... of Netherland. Largely it’s the names, not the work. You almost get the impression that Arthur Miller might have written After the Fall there, but it was mostly done in Connecticut; or that Kerouac might have written On the Road there, but that was mostly done on West 20th. Wolfe’s two posthumous novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home ...”

“... The ‘traditional’ English novel of good and bad manners was radicalised and updated. Karl Miller helped to institute a new criticism which seemed to owe more to a modest, clean, unadorned English than to the tenets of academe. Metaphor and pretty prose were not much favoured. In another part of the forest, some writers were questioning the plainness ...”

“... for the godly in England. In 1629 he became active in the Massachusetts Bay Company headed by John Winthrop, a Suffolk man. A year later Pynchon and his family boarded the Ambrose, one of Winthrop’s fleet of four ships that sailed for the New World, where there was known to be land for the taking. Pynchon settled seven miles south of Boston, near ...”

“... and are alike in seeming to celebrate the life that can still be led there by the right people. In John Buchan’s, dear old glamorous Fullcircle wins over what he presents as a bloody awful married couple – ‘Hampstead’ progressives – to a pagan-Catholic frame of mind, while Edith Wharton’s house, Bells, nearest post-office Thudeney-Blazes, tries the ...”

“... a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a perception of the activities of the levelling Labour governments which have come and gone since 1945. But there’s more of that in the second of the books than there is in the ...”

“... First came the monied retirees, who triggered off the real-estate boom (this is the background to John D. MacDonald’s underrated Condominium). Secondly, the mind-boggling sums of money generated by middle-class America’s insatiable appetite for prohibited cocaine. Thirdly, the invasion by criminal classes educated in villainy outside the US – in ...”

“... the money supply or of future public borrowing is like building a house on ectoplasm. Thus Marcus Miller, by no means unsympathetic to monetarist economics, goes so far as to describe M3 as a ‘relatively meaningless monetary aggregate’. And, lest proponents of pecuniary discipline shake off that comment by observing the more recent significance of the ...”

“... thinks of his montages as sentences. The impression is that each work says one thing and one only. John Berger wrote of Kennard: ‘I would say his work was pure – if the word hadn’t become dirty.’Archive of Dissent, an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery (until 19 January), complicates the idea of Kennard’s work as univocal and determined. As a ...”

“... in love. But while Jong took her inspiration from the hard-boiled egotistic journalism of Henry Miller, Dick has digested new theory to write her novel: ‘When we make love,’ she observes (without apparent facetiousness), ‘the switch of masculine/feminine signifiers is speedy, intricate, overwhelming.’ Deconstruction is an idea that hovers over the ...”

“... One might say that his was either the maddest form of sanity or the sanest form of madness. Arthur Miller called him ‘the mad inventor of modern theatre’, in a useful oversimplification. Carl Larsson’s portrait of Strindberg, on the book jacket, essentially in sepia but with rosy lips and penetratingly blue eyes (‘the most beautiful sapphire blue eyes ...”

“... cover depicting Marilyn Monroe mussing his hair had cost him his.)Roth’s first choice was Ross Miller, a friend, professor at the University of Connecticut and nephew of the playwright Arthur Miller. Unfortunately, the neph was no chip off the old oak. Hapless is perhaps the kindest word. A workhorse like Roth could only ...”

“... paying the highest price in the loss of the lives of our young soldiers – almost alone. I’m John Kerry and I approved this message. In a world of instant projections and medium-is-the-message contemplations, commentary on the presidential race of 2004 might finish right there: Kerry’s style is downbeat, America-blaming, slightly depressing, while the ...”

“... that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic assessments of the programme were back in fashion. According to Birt, the BBC’s Chairman, Marmaduke Hussey, regarded Panorama as a microcosm of a BBC that was ‘out of ...”