“... your time recently arguing with colleagues about the uses and abuses of literary theory. Not only do structuralism, deconstruction and their offshoots draw the biggest audiences at professional conferences, but the quarrel over them has aroused the curiosity of mass journals like Newsweek. Amidst this swirl of publicity and controversy, Jonathan Culler has ...”

“... Afew hours​ after Jean-Paul Sartre was injected with mescaline by his friend Daniel Lagache, a psychiatrist at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir phoned to check in on the first-time tripper. Her call came as a reprieve. As Sartre told her in a scrambled voice, she had interrupted a losing battle against a mass of octopuses ...”

“... Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth More and Donald Sinden ... Osborne as a Spartan, as a rugby fan, as Dr Watson ... He would, you feel, have snarled a hole in the screen. A Better Class of Person is written with the tautness and power of a well-organised novel. It is a ferociously sulky, rancorous book, remarkable for its account of the lower-middle-class ...”

“... consistent and negative: ‘Derrida’s deconstructive reversals are strategic interventions. They do not lay the groundwork for a new discipline – grammatology, he says, is the name of a question – but apply pressure to a system of concepts, upset it so as to make its presuppositions and limitations more apparent.’ I have left to the last the ...”

“... rhythms and what Leonard calls ‘glitzy crap’. This glitz was the leading feature of Brian De Palma’s remake of Scarface, with its play on luminous surfaces in which blood, neon and Miami sunsets finally merge into a single crimson garishness. The same glitz features in the current TV hit, Miami Vice. Mafiosi are usually portrayed as dressing like ...”

“... treatment of DiMaggio, but you can’t blame him for what he found. Cramer isn’t someone you’d want picking through the debris of your life. His last book, What It Takes, about the 1988 Presidential election, challenged the boundaries of bookbinding technology with its massiveness. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for his reporting in the Middle ...”

“... Politics is ‘participation in the state, zeal and passion for the state’. ‘Not only do I disagree that human destiny should be absorbed in state and society,’ Mann countered, ‘I even find this opinion repulsively inhuman.’So the tag that Yeats quoted in order to refute it came from a writer whom an interested reader might have expected to ...”

“... doing something they would both have regarded as work of the left hand. Writers are supposed to do best the essentially private work of writing, and they would hardly wish to be exposed to public view when engaged in it, nor would anybody but a singular pervert want to watch. All they could do in the circumstances was to ...”

“... reputation among writers in the years since her death, she’s reappeared like a revenant who’d been lurking in dark corners, and now everybody’s writing about her. Since the rediscovery of B.S. Johnson (if that’s what it was) that followed Jonathan Coe’s biography a few years ago there’s been a wave of enthusiasm for ‘experimental fiction’. A ...”

“... His agitation and confusion at being removed from Achbuie made him difficult to manage. He’d be up at the window of his room, pointing to invisible threats: ‘There’s wild beasts out there,’ he’d warn anyone who would listen. ‘Wild beasts.’ My father interpreted this as a symptom of dementia, but it was ...”

“... humidity is 56, the winds are south-westerly at seven mph, visibility stands at six miles. What do those numbers really signify? The temperature doesn’t sound extreme, yet when I leave my air-conditioned house I don’t feel that I’m stepping outside so much as entering another atmosphere. My spirits sag, my lips soon taste of sweat. Is this ...”

“... basketball courts, exercise classes, soccer fields …’ He doesn’t answer when asked if he’d send his own children to one. (There are now nearly 13,000 children in the camps. Like the camps for adults, they are mostly run by for-profit businesses, all of which were major corporate donors to the Trump campaign and inauguration. The price of their stocks ...”

“... though not solemnly: it was earning they scorned. To Sayre, they ‘always expected to be paid to do exactly what they wished, and many were’. Though they made exceptions (for Harold Ross, H.L. Mencken, Maxwell Perkins), most of them held editors in contempt, so that the turn to Hollywood (taken, among others, by Sayre’s father, whose credits include ...”

“... cast members) and the other three-quarters of the Beyond the Fringe team (Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore), who would go on to present their own take on the nuclear threat, in a sketch called ‘Civil War’.In that sketch, a worried Moore listens trustingly as a succession of posh-voiced government spokesmen seek to reassure him that all the ...”

“... In the summer of 1913, Jacques Copeau, the French stage pioneer, who had just founded his Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in Paris, wrote to Duncan Grant asking him to prepare the costumes and design for an innovative production of Twelfth Night. Grant completed the commission, using fabrics from the Omega Workshop for the costumes, and went over to Paris the following February to attend rehearsals and install his work ...”