“... were just jealous. But it’s also possible that the contrast between the views of Russian and English speakers can be put down to the fact that they simply weren’t reading the same novel.*The first English translation of The Brothers Karamazov was by Constance Garnett. It came out in 1912, a good while after the novel ...”

“... In the summer​ of 1934, after finishing her English degree at Oxford, Barbara Pym drafted a comic novel. Sending up her closest friends, she cast the arrogant fellow graduate she was in love with as a self-centred cleric, Archdeacon Hoccleve, given to complaining loudly about his wife and numbing his congregation with abstruse sermons ...”

“... New York​ was a great book town in the 1960s. You could buy new books in English at the elegant Scribner shop on Fifth Avenue, new books in French at the Librairie de France or Rizzoli, and old books in German at Mary S. Rosenberg’s austere, packed shop on Broadway, where neither I nor another obsessive friend could afford $100 for a first edition of Winckelmann’s history of ancient art ...”

“... property and political influence in the West Country. The poet’s overbearing father, Sir Richard, and his elder brother, Sir Charles, would between them represent Exeter or Devon in Parliament with little interruption between 1743 and 1812. John Bampfylde was educated by private tutors at the family home at Poltimore near Exeter, and later at ...”

“... critic suddenly subservient to a cliché. As important to Hattaway is a vaguely Hillish view of English history. He believes that late Elizabethan drama drew its strength from a social solidarity dissipated under the Stuarts as class distinctions hardened up and the London theatre divided between coterie privacy and a Red Bull populism. As a ...”

“... deadpan account of the tracking and capture of Eichmann in The House on Garibaldi Street; Richard Deacon, The Israeli Secret Service, which tells the story, among others, of Wolfgang Lotz, the Israeli spy with unassailably Aryan looks who infiltrated Egyptian government circles to get plans for rocket sites and the names of German technicians: a story ...”

“... like ‘loony Left’, a term invented by opponents. It is not likely that Coppe or Bauthumley or Richard Coppin would have assented to the sobriquet. As for the historians, perhaps Cohn, in The Pursuit of the Millennium, was a little credulous, since his thesis required that millennial sects be seen at their most crazy. But Morton, Hill and others have ...”

“... involves a break with Deconstruction. Norris argues in this book, as he has argued before, that Richard Rorty’s formalist reading of Derrida as a dissolver of truth and objectivity is wrong: Deconstruction may expose particular areas of aporia or vertiginous bewilderment in the logic of interpretation and explanation as these things are practised in the ...”

“... It lovingly describes how to plant, tend and ultimately harvest all kinds of tree, from the solid English oak to the Frenchified acacia with roots ‘which insinuate and run like loquorize under ground’. In his gardens at Sayes Court, on the edge of the naval dockyards at Deptford, he laid out complex arrangements of the most exotic trees and plants. Like ...”

“... own grandiose language. The novel was first published in Italian in 1957, and soon after in English, Russian and other languages. It didn’t appear in Russia itself until 1987. Pasternak was awarded, and accepted, the Nobel Prize in 1958; and then bullied into refusing it after all. His second telegram, cited by ...”

“... Americans against German cities. Americans come last chronologically, and also in intent, for as Richard Overy explains succinctly and well, the US saw the bombing of cities as a last resort and not the very first aim, as it was for Bomber Command. However, from Appendix 2 of the Hamburg police president’s report, which isn’t reproduced in the official ...”

“... to paranoia. Not the paranoid style in American politics, to quote the title of a famous essay by Richard Hofstadter (how could anyone say farewell to a mode so lavishly on the rise?), but to the paranoid fictions that animated DeLillo’s own novels The Names (1982) and Libra (1988), and went all the way back to Pynchon’s V (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 ...”

“... mere ‘hack’ before he became a poet, as some have suggested (indeed his critical biography of Richard Jefferies, Wilson argues, is ‘a classic of the genre’); nor was he ‘grindingly poor’ (‘his earnings between 1906 and 1912 were about the equivalent of a university professor’s’); but ‘perhaps the most serious distortion of the Thomas ...”

“... unskilled role with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was, as Richard Rhodes put it in The Making of the Atom Bomb, an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses. Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Ford (as was Lenin) and saw assembly lines as the embodiment of efficiency, order and consistency. These lines ...”

“... impossible to deny. Hence the rage he directs at Ian Kershaw, the author of the classic English-language biography. Knausgaard accuses Kershaw of adopting a dismissive attitude towards the young Hitler, of failing to warm to the passion and innocence of his subject. This excessively ‘negative’ view, Knausgaard suggests, is not just ...”