“... 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 ...”

“... relationship with the Lacanian enterprise entered a new phase. He went into analysis with Charles Melman, a prominent Freudian School analyst. Now, on his way to becoming an analyst, he could present himself as the legitimate heir not only of Lacan’s science but of his analytic kingdom as a whole, and would then be in the best position possible to ...”

“... Brothers, Tessie O’Shea, Milton Babbitt, The Rough Guide to Rai, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Charles Trenet, Ska Almighty, John Dowland, the organ music of Johann Fux (heh heh), Ian Bostridge, the Ramones, Astor Piazzola, Ethel Merman’s Disco Album, Magnetic Fields, Flagstad and Svanholm in Die Walküre, Lord Kitchener and the Calypso All-Stars, Sonic ...”

“... Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard – who were sworn opponents of Maastricht, none with any hope of winning an election. In government, Blair’s initial doubts about the single currency, prompted by the hostility to the euro of the Murdoch press that had helped elect him, soon faded. But Gordon Brown’s firm refusal to abandon sterling, made from his ...”

“... to declare the crisis over in the summer of 1847.’ O Grada has analysed the papers of Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, and suggests that, throughout these years, Trevelyan believed that the ‘Famine had been ordained by God to teach the Irish a lesson, and therefore should not be too much interfered with’. As early as ...”

“... a hair-raising frolic indeed: Bobsy was president of the Arts Club of Chicago and her husband, Charles Barnett Goodspeed, the trustee in question, a prominent Chicago businessman related to one of the founders of the university, Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed. Bob Hutchins’s partisans gossip to this day about Maude’s psychic frailties. In a 1990 ...”