“... Even so, you can’t help feeling it requires the talents of a comic genius – perhaps a Mark Twain, whose satire on King Leopold’s Congo was so astute – to lay the thing bare in all its painful absurdity. A modern-day Twain might have received the following outline from his researchers and gone on to ...”

“... reasons than that, and there is no reason to think that Orwell was fundamentally different from Mark Twain or George Eliot or O. Henry or Rebecca West. Certainly his motives for writing under a name other than his own seem straightforward enough. He was writing about his life among the ‘lowest of the low’, and his lower-upper-middle-class family ...”

“... was thought the life and soul of the party (‘It was a profession in those days’) and a budding Mark Twain. Hemingway depicted him in The Sun Also Rises (1926) as the successful writer Bill Gorton. Philip Barry, a Yale classmate, wrote the part of Nick Potter, the socialite hero of his hit comedy, Holiday (1929), with Stewart in mind – and Stewart ...”

“... by some of the people wandering in and out, including Chevy Chase, who spoke to her as if she were Mark Twain or the Statue of Liberty. Michaels made a huge fuss of her, too, and she was, in truth, the stellar opposite of the unobtrusive, silent reporter who keeps her distance and haunts the blind spots. At the party afterwards, at Barolo on West ...”

“... block by inducing a sympathetic resonance in the buildings, while another made his friend Mark Twain shit himself. Tesla’s wireless illusions drew ever larger audiences across the US and Europe. In one demonstration at the Royal Institution in February 1892 he spelled out the name of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, in electric light and made ...”

“... The secret Mark McGurl discloses is the degree to which the richness of postwar American culture (we will here stick to the novel, for reasons to be explained) is the product of the university system, and worse than that, of the creative writing programme as an institutional and institutionalised part of that system ...”

“... be both in and out of the game, as Whitman put it – to have a private as well as a public self. Mark Twain went to great lengths to impose himself on the crowd, and he was a more successful performer than Messrs Vidal and Mailer, but he was also able to hold a self in reserve. For Hemingway it was all much more difficult. His private life was ...”

“... population had lost its connection to land and a feeling for what it could do. Nobody quoted Mark Twain: ‘Buy land, they’re not making it any more.’ Nobody explained, as Christophers does here, that land is an ideal vehicle for the storage and distribution of value: finite but also ubiquitous, fungible on a global scale, the favoured form of ...”

“... days of Andrew Jackson, the great champion of the white settlers on the frontier. Young Harry read Mark Twain, played the piano and listened to Mozart. He disapproved of boxing, guns and Wagner. Endowed with porch-front charm, he was self-conscious about his ‘girl’s mouth’ and his ‘inordinate desire to look nice’ when posing for photographs. His ...”

“... a degree unmatched even by the industrial East. Stanford’s fellow tycoons in these projects were Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker and Collis P. Huntington – ‘and their corruption was as big as their profit,’ Solnit says. These ‘Big Four’, all former Sacramento storekeepers who had sold goods to Gold Rush miners, had come to monopolise political and ...”

“... infinitely dense thing. And that … had kind of exploded.’ He collaborated with his friend Mark Costello on Signifying Rappers (1990), an odd, fizzy book about ‘serious rap’ and ‘the “postmodern” inversion’. He started, and abandoned, a PhD at Harvard. He booked himself into hospital with suicidal thoughts. And then things started going ...”

“... last page.’ ‘I know!’ ‘If that doesn’t stir me, I just shut it up with a bang, and mark it N.G. But give me a last page – and I’m infallible. Infallible.’ ‘You would be infallible even if you never opened …’ ‘No, no. Balzac – Balzac! Not me! I take off my hat to Balzac! I must open it!’ Satire can’t buy you friends but ...”

“... of the greatest of all literatures’. Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James – yes, even Mark Twain – ‘may be said to be the distinctive American way back to (or away from) Shakespeare ...’ This is a moment of self-caricature, worthy of Scrooge. There is no awareness of Ameri-canness as a different type of contextual thinking, one that ...”

“... His theme was unhappiness itself, but his skill was as happy as it was playful … One ordeal of Mark Twain was the constant fear that his occluded seriousness would be overlooked. That betrayed him into his two or three books of out-and-out seriousness. The theme, the ordeal and the fear are Frost’s too. The best jokes in his letters are shadowed by ...”

“... Sand. But Cooper also had the misfortune to inspire one of the funniest hatchet-jobs ever written, Mark Twain’s ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences’ (1895), which detects 114 out of a possible 115 offences committed in two-thirds of a page of The Deerslayer (1841), and proves with a wealth of examples – and, it must be said, they’re not hard ...”