“... words on the page. One of the miniature masterpieces in Wu’s new edition is the sketch of John Wilson Croker, a Tory functionary and ‘a moving nausea, with whose stomach nothing agrees’. That’s one reason Hazlitt can’t stomach him; another is that he ‘affects literature, and fancies he writes like Tacitus, by leaving out the conjunction ...”

“... Hearing the news on the Today programme this morning R. nearly cries. I met Bowie only once, at John Schlesinger’s sometime in the 1980s, and remember him as a slight, almost colourless figure, who was somehow Scots. M. calls later and recalls how someone he knew picked up Bowie when he was still David Jones. He offered to come round, bringing his guitar ...”

“... have, I imagine, met those specifications. But the one who comes first to an American’s mind is John Dewey: a man whose engagement in primary and higher education, and whose active participation in politics, were considerably more extensive than Russell’s – and, I should argue, more focused, intelligent and useful. Dewey was the most prominent ...”

“... for class insecurity. This underdog cockiness persisted for decades, serving as the driver of John Travolta’s sidewalk strut in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, where disco prince Tony Manero eventually tires of Bay Ridge Brooklyn and his mooky friends as the magic spires of Manhattan beckon. A product of the jukebox era, Podhoretz belonged to an older ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of near misses, such as when Louis, the French Dauphin, was offered the English throne after King John’s death and was cheered through the streets of London before being defeated in the Battle of Lincoln in May 1217 and then the Battle of Sandwich in August, perhaps the first ever battle fought by sailing ships in the open sea.Even the fiasco of the last ...”

“... the ambiguities and resorts to conventional wisdom. His list of leaders includes Harry Truman and John Kennedy – two presidents who risked war by exacerbating tensions with the Soviet Union. Dallek views FDR from the perspective of a mid-century liberal who has apparently made his peace with the warfare state. As Dallek sees him, FDR, like his cousin ...”

“... to the public at large. Impatience with the old ways had spread far beyond the media. Sir John Hunt, a former cabinet secretary, broke cover as early as election day 1983 to voice the discontents of the mandarins:In the absence in our system of a chief executive with his own supporting staff, a ‘hole in the centre’ of government was perceived ...”

“... a critical reading that is inevitably shaped by the preoccupations of the time; no doubt Susan Howe’s declaration in The Birth-mark (1993) that Dickinson’s ‘manuscripts should be understood as visual productions’ will at some point in the future seem as wholly of its time as Todd and Bingham’s blithe imposition of titles and removal of ...”

“... with which he wound up his adolescence recalls something of Kepler’s horoscope of himself: Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, a tall, angular, dangly, ugly, fair-haired fellow of 18½, quick on the uptake, with a considerable if superficial stock of general knowledge and a lot of original ideas, general and theoretical. An incorrigible striker of attitudes, which ...”

“... of the now lost ‘critic as intellectual’, those emblematic figures such as Trilling or Irving Howe who assumed their cultural inheritance in the 1940s and 1950s. Wilson, born in 1895, came into his own in the 1920s. It underlines his remoteness to recall that he had already graduated from Princeton before America entered the First World War. His ...”

“... 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 close of Remembering Roth, he bids sad adieu to Philip ...”

“... took place late on the second day, once Heron had already confessed to Detective Chief Inspector John Renwick and Detective Inspector Colin Dudley, who had taken over the questioning from lower-ranking officers. You can hear them steering Heron in the direction they want him to go. When he suggests he attacked Nikki with a ‘metal bar’, they make it clear ...”

“... with Cameron’s description of this as a ‘slight fall’. After the letters were published, John McDonnell hailed the prime minister as a convert to the anti-austerity cause. The unedifying spectacle of a prime minister ignorant of the impact of his own government’s policies, or so taken in by his ministers’ rhetoric that he could not reconcile ...”

“... than winning the National Book Award for a first book? With Saul Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin in his corner – ‘four tigers’, as he describes them, of American Jewish literature – it might have been possible to ignore the fringe of pious malcontents, but appeasement has never gained ground in Roth’s personal style. In her ...”