“... of a writer whose lifelong financial needs and intense desire for fame compelled him to hope for commercial, popular success, even as it simultaneously provoked in him a revulsion against the concessions to stylistic and formal conventions he would be required to make. Thus, in the opening sections of Pierre, as in the opening sections of ...”

“... life as ‘Roberts’ before the trial began, but decided to put him on the stand in the hope that it would remain concealed from the jury.Nor do Taylor’s bigamy and perjury appear to have damaged him much in the eyes of his friends. A hundred years later, and one could easily imagine them leaving him alone in the library with a loaded revolver. As ...”

“... figures deplorable, the relish with which they are pursued in the tabloid press chilling. I hope Mr Langham gets a short sentence and that he will not become the pariah the authorities would like, and that the BBC, not these days noted for its courage, will shortly re-employ him. 11 August. On Saturdays the Guardian is running a series on ...”

“... is there in me which attracts men to me, young and old? I am deeply grateful for the power, and hope I may use it for the good of those who succumb to it.’ A year after Millicent’s birth, Mabel was dealt another blow. David was offered a job teaching astronomy and directing the college observatory at Amherst College, his alma mater. (He had failed a ...”

“... so suave is the rendering of the lives of the three women described here, one is emboldened to hope that even the most obtuse reader might come away from All We Know, if not with some synoptic understanding of the lesbian ‘tribe’ (whatever that might be), then at least with an ability to spot members of that tribe when they are seated around the dinner ...”

“... our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope that our show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.’ This has at least the value of staking a claim to decency in language that is decent; but the hopeful words of the performers of Hamilton and the flailing ...”

“... McKenna in 1957 It was strange being alone with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished ...”

“... heard in the word ‘Norton’ an echo of that job, and even of his family – he was appointed as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. From childhood onwards, Eliot was fascinated not just by names in general, but by his own. Murder in the Cathedral, the 1935 play which, throughout the period covered by this volume of letters, yields a healthy income ...”

“... the Mail campaign that led to the introduction of Section 28. (Thatcher’s authorised biographer, Charles Moore, suggested that her motive was her hatred of local government education policies, as if a legislative exercise in queer-bashing, which blighted the lives of gay children for a generation, were somehow excusable as a means to a worthy end.) In this ...”

“... second letter in this book is from 1957, when McGahern was working as a teacher in Dublin. ‘I hope to go home about Wednesday,’ he writes to a friend. A footnote explains: ‘Home, at this point, was still the garda barracks in Cootehall, Co. Roscommon,’ where McGahern and his siblings were brought up by their father after their mother died in ...”

“... to Nancy Drew or Tom Sawyer as an ‘innocent abroad’. Badlands was loosely based on the case of Charles Starkweather, who went on a killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming in the late 1950s together with his teenage girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. In the movie Holly meets Kit (Martin Sheen) in a South Dakota town: ‘Little did I realise,’ she tells us over ...”

“... Who Killed Aleksander Pushkin? (Not, we learn, his duelling partner and brother-in-law, George-Charles D’Anthès, but a grassy-knoll-style hitman hiding in the bushes.) And when you finally get to Pushkin, you’re liable to be told that if you don’t speak Russian you can’t get to him anyway, because it’s not his prose that makes him great. His ...”

“... runner. His health remained poor, and he left Uppingham early to be packed off to Australia in the hope that the climate would mend his lungs. He worked as a tutor to start with, then spent much of his two years Down Under in sheep stations in the outback. The whole experience shaped the rest of his life. As a bespectacled young jackaroo just out from England ...”

“... his poetry is least negotiable in the hands of people who read it on the look-out for what they hope to find there. He knew himself to be a great poet, a man privileged to receive the awesome and often close to terrifying visitations of genius. It is about the gestations of that poetry that he most often writes, as if in wonderment at his own ...”

“... People” could not be relied on to be invariably just, compassionate and righteous.’ Charles Taylor put forward a similar analysis in Hegel (1975), though he had fewer regrets about the obsolescence of ‘the Enlightenment vision of society’ with its self-sufficient individuals pursuing an atomised agenda of individualistic rights. Lyotard ...”