“... while strolling up the High Street and enter the hall already well into his third paragraph. The Dean of Divinity who was alleged to have committed the only Magdalen murder, and how it had been decided not to call the police in for fear of scandal. How Harry Weldon, leader of the more progressive fellows, turned down every single Etonian applicant for entry ...”

“... editorships of Jacques Rivière and Jean Paulhan, than Les Temps Modernes or Tel Quel. Once we are past the philosophes science more or less disappears from view: there is no sign of the influential discourses of medicine, or evolution, or more recently of cosmology. As for the actual making and selling of books, there are good sections on that for the ...”

“... Kerouac, ‘On the Road’ (original typescript, 1951) Jack Kerouac, ‘The Slouch Hat’ (c.1960) John Cohen, ‘Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Gregory Corso’ (1959) Wallace Berman, Untitled (Allen Ginsberg, c.1960)PreviousNext These names belong to the original small group of friends who met in New York in the early 1940s. Within ten years Ginsberg had moved ...”

“... her arrival at Cheltenham Ladies’ College in 1963 and her renunciation of alcohol in 1982. We learn very little of the tastes or opinions of the character who is meant to hold the book together. What we do learn is that Rosie is eager to please, easily impressed and unsure of herself. She plies us with bits of gossip ...”

“... she ends up in her old job as barmaid at the Midnight Bell. It is instructive to compare John Updike’s literary persona with that of Hamilton, for in many ways they have almost exactly the same kind of talents. Both are experts in the area where social comedy abuts on the most precise instinct for what a society is like, and what details and ...”

“... the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned … as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation. This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a ...”

“... the New York arts scene fails to put in an appearance in Tippins’s book, starting with William Dean Howells and Stephen Crane, up through Thomas Wolfe, and on to anyone you care to name, sliding to an elegant halt with Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland. Largely it’s the names, not the work. You almost get the impression that Arthur Miller might have ...”

“... There is often a vacancy to his acting, which can give the illusion of mystery. The producer John Foreman recalled that Newman’s second wife, Joanne Woodward, once said to him: ‘If you think he’s thinking something, he’s not always thinking something.’In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman hardly moves his eyes when he speaks – only his ...”

“... He affects​ the Metaphysics,’ Dryden wrote of John Donne, ‘not only in his satires, but in his Amorous Verses, where Nature alone should reign; and perplexes the Minds of the Fair Sex with nice Speculations of Philosophy, when he shou’d ingage their Hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of Love ...”

“... In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most ...”

“... Perhaps, compared with J.G. Farrell’s previous three novels, The Hill Station (as its editor, John Spurling, decided to call it) might be termed ‘light’, but only in that the writing is less dense, less effortful in the reading, than is the case with the Irish Troubles and, more markedly, with The Singapore Grip. Jane Austen comes to mind, and not ...”

“... the book. To date she has only published one third of her version and dropped no hints about when we might see the rest. A while back, quizzed by a reporter, she said: ‘May God give me the courage to finish it’ – which is surely a good call, even if you’re not a believer. Last month a journalist friend put the question again, and Dai simply ...”

“... at the turn of the 20th century and advertised to appeal to ‘refined persons’. When William Dean Howells first told James about the building, James replied that the news ‘at once deeply agitated & wildly uplifted’ him. It was his ‘delirious dream’ that the event would bring his work to the American public’s attention, but he feared that the ...”

“... old-fashioned fideism: nothing in the world could count as evidence for your beliefs, since what we gullibly call the world is simply a construct of them. And since you do not relate to your convictions as you relate to your socks, selecting a sombre or stylish brand as the fancy takes you, you are as lumbered with them as you are with the size of your ...”

“... Powerlessness, his 1980 study of quiescence and rebellion among Appalachian ‘mountaineers’, John Gaventa noted that where ‘a positive self-image is not portrayed for a particular group, that group may develop a sense of inadequacy about itself, reinforced by how other groups project their media stereotypes on them’ – and he isn’t talking about ...”