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“... Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it over the years to get American novelists to jump through hoops. And when she asked Mailer if he’d care to contribute something to her magazine we can now be grateful to Lennon for bringing us the following ...”

“... tired, I’ll just retire to bed.’ The inspector-general of police turned to my parents, and said: ‘I wish all your friends were like that! Where did you find such a cultured guy?’ A week later, when he was looking at pics of the disappeared CP leaders, he saw that the person he’d met at dinner was actually on the most-wanted list! So, it was a ...”

“... everything’ – while there are several books about women who ‘knew too much’. It’s often said that some quite ordinary people ‘know everything’, but that usually comes with qualifications too: you can ‘know everything’ if you win pub quizzes, or you can ‘know everything’ about birdwatching, or baking cakes, or The Archers. But the ...”

“... inconceivable. As Mr Brook-Shepherd points out, those who spy for the Soviet Union today, the Edward Howards in the US, the Geoffrey Primes in Britain, are prisoners of venality, lechery or blackmail. Their secrets may be important, but they will not be promoted as ‘internationalist’ models for a future Soviet generation or buried as heroes in ...”

“... he at least change that tell-tale K to a C? Because he was too stiff-necked, my mother said, and sighed. And so I became divided in myself; and this too, perhaps, made me seek refuge in the Otherworld. Early on, this otherworld exists for Richard as a Fairyland whose occasions are derived from the Border Ballads, with decor borrowed from artists ...”

“... that the recollections of those involved in that crisis bore no relation to what they had actually said or done at the time. But Mr Selden seems to have avoided most of the pitfalls of oral history. His book is a work of prodigious industry and will remain of great value to students of the period even when all the documents have appeared. In particular, his ...”

“... Montpellier University and lived several years in France and Belgium. Molotov is reported to have said of him: ‘He is very handsome and leaves a good impression. He is quite cultured but you sense Western influence in his upbringing.’ He has been described as a ‘garrulous charmer’. He was the main political leader in the Resistance and, at 73, is the ...”

“... because her spirit was too independent, too argumentative, too much – as Coleridge shudderingly said – that of a ‘blue-stocking’. She received a uniformly bad press from the poets and their admirers and wives and families because she stuck too loyally to the idea of feminine enlightenment which they in their age were supposed to endorse. She did not ...”

“... Word is Our Bond’, which reappears now in The Lords of Limit, a volume which, it must be said, in everything from format to price does very great credit to the publishers. This particular essay has provoked in another attentive reader, John Lucas (LRB, Vol. 5, No 20), the reflection that ‘language cannot be innocent.’ But surely it needs to be ...”

“... a tragedy, that the objects I had enjoyed trying to identify – was this Prince Albert or a young Edward VII? – also represented something unknowably private and painful.Objects from the past, if they survive, lose and accrue meaning over time. Their original human associations and contexts, their given purposes and original attractions, dissolve and are ...”

“... that there was anything very equitable about his dealings with them. As the Jacobean diplomat Sir Edward Hoby observed, it was ‘lawful for a Christian to take away anything from infidels’. Pynchon was a restless man and six years after his arrival in America he headed a group of settlers who moved from Massachusetts Bay to a new site. Formerly the home ...”

“... have indicated are not for polite society. ‘Strumpet and stomach and damn must never, never be said,’ sang one Victorian vicarage family in the isolation of their nursery. ‘Red, white and blue, dirty kangaroo, sitting on a lamp-post doing number two,’ was what we used to mutter in our Surrey back-garden. My great uncle, a Presbyterian minister, once ...”

“... from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry anthologies cashed in on the landmark case of Donaldson v. Becket, which more or less destroyed copyright law; there were the pioneering ...”

“... of Stratford-upon-Avon is the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed since the ...”

“... happened to the 1930s poets, who had much to say about the condition of England, though it is said, with what accuracy I don’t know, that the four elements of the MacSpaunday group – MacNeice, Spender, Auden and Day-Lewis – were only once in the same room together; and there can have been but few occasions when the whole company of Angry Young Men ...”