“... have a memory of sitting there and feeling smug,’ she wrote of attending a class taught by John Crowe Ransom in 1938. She identified as a Trotskyite, placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning ...”

“... maybe, or Oakland, or the astral plane. They were the place she went to leave her body and feel no pain, and there is no real need for us to be there. She would go on telling anyway. Berlin’s gifts are not ones you have ever tried or been told to cultivate. The details she chooses are those you have purposely ...”

“... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...”

“... books under review belong to very different genres, both of which are relevant to this task – John Willett’s a critical and historical study based on many years as reviewer, English editor and translator of Brecht, Ronald Hayman’s a lively, detailed biography – though the first turns out to be far the more expert, original and ...”

“... blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ... The street was deep in dark-gold river sand ... The zebus’ hooves, the people’s feet waded in golden sand, dampered by golden sand. Nothing here is ...”

“... the village, who beat me up for my intolerable conceit. But the capacity to read brought with it no corresponding advance in intellectual curiosity. I rested lazily on my laurels, taking as long as anyone else of my age to venture beyond the conventional diet of Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows and the Famous Five. By the early ...”

“... nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’Once upon a time there was …        ‘A King!’ my little readers will say at once.        ...”

“... track of the coverage. ‘At the start of the strike,’ he told me, ‘we stressed to the men, on no account would any of them commit violence or damage. We’d witnessed some of the miners commit damage. The newspapers ran amok on them. We didn’t want the newspapers being able to run amok on us.’He failed to heed his own advice. After Albertina and the ...”

“... and angles broken off for the sake of correspondence’. Neiman understands, of course, that ‘no two histories are ever entirely alike.’ The question is whether we can, without doing violence to the past or the present, usefully take lessons from the German experience. Do analogies between the two countries work? In one sense they do: it is possible to ...”

“... pundits of all lands found themselves blessed by the Zeitgeist, and redoubled their efforts until no open space was without its fairground tent and its impatient queues eager for lessons in portent-reading. As Martin Thom patiently points out over and over again, the trouble was not that the hucksters were mistaken. They were often quite right about what was ...”

“... cities and ‘a pre-Modern formlessness’ in remote, late 20th-century battlefields about which no one cares but the protagonists. Cantering through this slow-motion apocalypse were two new horsemen: environmental degradation and a culture of crime. The article is recycled in the book, with politic changes and elaborations, and the itineraries are much the ...”

“... vibrant and fluent recorded performance. Part of its impact came from the fact that it had no competitors or predecessors (only Wanda Landowska had done it on harpsichord and Rosalyn Tureck, little known outside New York, on piano): the piano music of Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninoff dominated the landscape. Gould instantly transformed the geography of ...”

“... toward a Supreme Fiction”. “I said that I thought we’d reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognised it was a fiction.” Exactly. The ‘place’ was Hartford, Connecticut, but it could have been anywhere. When the American writer travelled to the west of his or her more settled home, dislocation turned ...”

“... Together they brought the women of Govan in league with women in other parts. They agreed that no one should pay their rent. Out there was an unknown land, with pain and broken bodies. The thing to do was to hold your ground. The women’s emotion rose up like smoke, and joined the air of political fact, as if somewhere they could hear the guns, and ...”

“... the artist simply returned home, where he was found sitting serenely cross-legged and wearing no clothes. The King declared this man to be the true artist. ‘Why is it,’ asks Fei Dawei, ‘that even as early as two thousand years ago, behaviour and procedure were seen as “true art” rather than the technique of painting itself?’ A disproportionate ...”