“... Three hundred senators and members of Congress crowded the hallways. Everybody who wanted to be elected or re-elected to any office came to see and be seen. All over the world events were closely followed: the Arab media reported on them extensively; al-Jazeera devoted an hour to discussing the conference. The ...”

“... early months of the Second World War that the sculptor Eric Kennington believed it could literally be a weapon. He suggested to Kenneth Clark, who chaired the War Artists Advisory Committee, that polished brass models of Churchill, filled either with propaganda leaflets or delayed-action explosives, might be dropped over ...”

“... he once said. ‘But it exists. It is just about the only photograph I have seen of Schindler.’ David Bailey, or Antonioni’s Blow-Up, was one model to follow, but Eagar went to Vietnam. When he returned he got a job at Which? magazine, where he says he ‘tested’ red wine. But photography was always the aim. In 1969 he photographed the images on his ...”

“... David Wilkie, 20 years old, a sober, modest son of the manse, came to London from Edinburgh in 1805. He brought with him a couple of pictures, a sound training and great diligence. In 1806 he exhibited The Village Politicians at the Academy to great acclaim. Scotland had produced a Dutch talent – a Teniers or an Ostade ...”

“... for different connections. We hear ‘all the sounds of the earth are like music,’ which could be turned into ‘Music is what matters here.’ The song announces: ‘Everything’s goin’ my way.’ Our hero, with a little adaptation, could say the same: ‘Everything’s comin’ my way, most of it terrible.’The film is Highest 2 Lowest, written ...”

“... littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie. In the 1980s, the American poet David Antin charged that ‘anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed ...”

“... pages of more or less hagiographic ‘house histories’ and the nuts-and-bolts trade material to be found in the weekly columns of the Bookseller. Direct approaches to publishers and agents (though some are helpful) are commonly turned away. And, one suspects, many British publishers have simply junked their dead files. Crusoe-like, the student of current ...”

“... I didn’t belong to Alamein and so had no right to attend, but one year was invited to do so by the company commander. I accepted with little enthusiasm. The Field-Marshal was by then retired, but his reputation continued to circulate and was reinforced by hints, anecdotes and diary ...”

“... fish’, Sergei Eisenstein declares at one point in this 1946 memoir that he worked amphibiously, by extremes. ‘I create an arbitrary and capricious flood in my films. Then I endeavour to divide this flood with the dry beats of a metronome, according to its conformity with certain principles.’ Eisenstein’s dialectic of riot and order can stand as a ...”

“... of Jerusalem. Strictly, those celebrations are eight hundred years late. Jerusalem was founded by the Canaanites in about 1800 BC. Since then it has changed hands some twenty-five times, been destroyed 17 times, and its inhabitants have frequently been massacred. Round about 1000 ...”

“... Henry James insisted that although the conception of the novel required that the unfolding action be in some sense seen through Strether’s eyes, there had been no question of using first-person narration. That technique, he insisted, would have been too self-indulgent: his treatment of Strether had ‘to keep in view proprieties much stiffer and more ...”

“... post 13 years earlier. He died, aged 82, only six months after I glimpsed him. On the cover of David Ellis’s Memoirs of a Leavisite he is photographed standing with a tree and a bench behind him in (according to the jacket info) the very garden into which he escaped that autumn afternoon. He is wearing the same literary-critical uniform too: the baggy ...”

“... Whenever​ we are in the company of J.M. Coetzee, whether it be an interview, a novel, a memoir or an essay, we are inexorably drawn into the realm of the ethical. We must judge and be judged, or at least strive to do the one and brace ourselves for the other. Hence a book titled The Good Story will not offer an analysis of the qualities that make for a satisfying reading experience, but investigate the consequences of storytelling in terms, frankly, of good and evil ...”

“... some kind of hippy Venus with an overbite. She was the personification of the New Woman, liberated by the pill and by her talent to take ownership of her body, her art and her destiny. She was thoughtful, feisty, free-wheeling, ‘open to experience and in touch with the miraculous’, as she put it. Her precocious songs ...”

“... you, sir.’ Gertrude Stein’s first words were ‘In that case, what’s the question?’ Henry David Thoreau’s first words were ‘Moose ... Indian ...’ Sir Thomas Urquhart’s first word was something like ‘Habonghadingdonghagong.’ Leonardo da Vinci’s first words were ‘God and man have I offended.’ William Ill’s first words were ‘Can ...”