“... the Kellys, who came to Boston from Ireland before the Second World War. Eileen married Ronald Charles Spahr of Philadelphia, the son of German immigrants, and in the late 1950s the couple moved to a three-bedroom colonial house in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, which is fairly close to Philadelphia. Everyone you ask speaks of the Spahrs as a classic American ...”

“... am doing occasional work over at the library – and am having my sixth treatment tomorrow. I hope I won’t have to have many more.’ And on Christmas Day, at home with her family before returning to the hospital, she wrote to Gordon to thank him for the copy of Axel’s Castle, Edmund Wilson’s study of the Symbolist poets: ‘Your letters, which I am ...”

“... point is that they are ‘ordinary virtues’, and that their opposites are ‘ordinary vices’. Charles Taylor, whom Gordon cites, lists five features of these ‘ordinary virtues’: they are rooted in dispositions accessible to anyone; they begin at home, in daily life; they subsist in the interaction of each of us with our fellow human beings at the ...”

“... indeed receive the royal nod. Instead, Roth chose Blake Bailey, the well-regarded biographer of Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend), Richard Yates and John Cheever, three alcohol-plagued novelists whose torments kept late hours. As it happened Atlas would outlive Roth only by a year, dying in September 2019 from complications of a lung condition. At the ...”

“... on this point). He produced a letter from the supercomputer supplier acknowledging the order. Charles Sturt University provided a photocopy of his staff card, proving he had lectured there, and Wright sent me a copy of the thesis he’d submitted for a doctorate his critics claim he doesn’t have. I had arrived​ five minutes early at 28-50 Degrees, a ...”

“... were mostly old, and the Irish Parliamentary Party had never fully recovered from the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell. (Parnell, first elected to the House of Commons in 1875, and known for his charisma, cunning and strategic skills, was dubbed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’. He was brought down in 1890, having been named by William O’Shea as ...”

“... dimmed by the circumstances of his incarceration. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t look in hope for the places where creative survival might be found. It’s just that I doubt this gets us closer to the man himself.Some of the writing on the drawings is, as Adamson put it, esoteric. One drawing, done in the art studio on a large sheet of paper (and ...”

“... city, from ancient Rome to the 1990s community architecture movement, as sponsored by Prince Charles, as if modernity had never happened – she had a slide to show us, of the heir to the throne, pictured in friendly communion with a group of ‘grubby, labouring lads’. The second joke came in her reading of Poussin’s painting of Phocion’s ...”

“... frail older people.’ When I met them, Sanders and Furlong reckoned there were reasons for hope at the Infirmary, in the sense that bad as things were, they hadn’t got worse. Emergency admissions had levelled off; in December, attendances had fallen slightly compared to the previous year. Whether that was a result of alternatives to traditional ...”

“... Lonoff seems to represent a life entirely made over to the demands of art, though his wife, Hope, has paid at least as high a price. Lonoff is a version of Bernard Malamud, and there is another Jewish writer in the book, Felix Abravanel, who is a distillation of Bellow with a dash of Mailer. Pierpont rightly acclaims as ‘one of the most beautifully ...”

“... kept aside some money for this counter-Encounter, not a great deal, but it was just lying there. Charles Osborne, who was literature director of the Council at that point, saw no reason why, if I reinvented the Review as a new monthly magazine, that money – I think about £20,000 – couldn’t go to launch one issue of it. And that’s how the New Review ...”

“... had told me ten days earlier that Che Guevara’s guerrillas were encircled and that they had no hope of escape. Now he informed us that Guevara had been captured and was dead. Many of the Army’s High Command, including General Alfredo Ovando Cándia, the Bolivian Vice President, flew in from La Paz in an ancient DC6 that afternoon.By early evening, the ...”

“... all, I learned that it was only through the meticulous attention to such rituals that a man could hope to make his body tolerable to the world. But, as to the body itself, what I learned was strictly limited by the fact that, at a certain moment, my father invariably turned his back to me, and, manipulating the long tails that shirts had in those days, passed ...”

“... to explain why in a statement about sleaze. I said what we shouldn’t do was close our eyes and hope no one would notice. Making the ends meet in a moral sense was the project’s great conundrum, and he agreed to let me say what happened. On Wednesday​ , 19 January, it rained all day. I was beginning to wonder about the time-wasting. I couldn’t ...”

“... meals on the wards. Nadia could be seen at a high window with her husband, waving a flag when all hope was gone as the fire raged through the building later that night. Emergency calls made by the Choucairs suggest they believed to the last that the helicopters above the tower could save them. They died with their three girls, Mierna, 13, Fatima, 11, and ...”