“... Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of ...”

“... number to take the step of insisting that George was among those included. Sixty years earlier, Swift had shown how cynically this line could be used:But now, go search all Europe roundAmong the savage monsters crown’d,With vice polluting every throne(I mean all kings except our own).Looking back on the previous century, Romantic writers found much to ...”

“... with John Kerry in Vietnam,’ the announcer said in the notorious TV commercial produced by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. ‘And they’re the men who spent years in North Vietnamese prison camps. Tortured for refusing to confess what John Kerry accused them of … of being war criminals.’ The tropes come straight from the Fonda mythology. A doctored ...”

“... beyond the stereotypes, though in fact there is evidence of a richer and more specific interest in Swift in Amis’s novels, from The Rachel Papers onwards. A poem called ‘The Place of the Damned’ is, incidentally. Swift’s contribution to the idea that hell is other people, which can stand as part of my contribution to ...”

“... last of the great New York intellectuals associated with Partisan Review,’ the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in a memorial tribute, ‘she was the only one in that crowd who understood and appreciated film in a wholly cosmopolitan manner, as part of art and culture and thought.’ Partisan Review’s​ intellectuals and their English department ...”

“... its ordinariness’ and basing his judgments on ‘the life most people led’. In this spirit Swift is praised in A Little History of Poetry for the poems in which ‘he notices everyday things’; Dickinson as someone who, though odd, could ‘write wonderfully about the external, everyday world’; and William Carlos Williams, busy writing Paterson, is ...”

“... regime against the country. In March 2012, responding to sanctions of Iranian banks by the EU, the SWIFT electronic payment system, which facilitates cross-border payments, expelled dozens of Iranian financial institutions, severely restricting the country’s ability to conduct international trade. The US followed with the executive order in July, but left ...”

“... This, one might think, is either insanity or some comic fantasy produced in the imagination of a Swift or Kafka. Jewish sheep? The conversion of Arab sheep to Judaism? Surely these things cannot be real. Such distinctions, however, are part of the system of possessive exclusivism which has been imposed upon reality by central forces in Israeli society. The ...”

“... you may have noticed that those who are too quick to shout ‘conspiracy theorist’ are equally swift, when consequences for authority and consensus impend, to look serious and say: ‘It’s more complicated than that.’ These have become standard damage-control reflexes.In his Kennedy assassination novel Winter Kills, Condon’s protagonist is Nick, the ...”

“... authority that allowed Hardwick to produce ‘The Decline of Book Reviewing’, and to deliver the swift and slashing put-downs that make her criticism fun. (Anaïs Nin? ‘Mercilessly pretentious.’ Faulkner? ‘Historically ridiculous.’) She was supremely confident and grabbed her subjects by the throat. But some of her longer sentences are so riddled ...”

“... would not resolve the question. He was capable of using the word ‘great’, as Fielding did in Jonathan Wild, to encompass the great-vulgar and the small and criminal. Satire is not one of the liberal arts, but it may be the only art that is liberating by its nature. It is not therefore virtuous: it frees the artist from restraint, in a way that may do ...”

“... entrance. Everyone on the train looked terribly prosperous, clean and peaceful as they read about Jonathan King and the Nias earthquake in the Standard. It is amazing to watch the skill with which three people can stand in a rocking train, in a space less than two metres square, without touching each other, and read their papers without falling over. At Baker ...”

“... for any posterity. It is noticeable that the one outstanding exception, the remarkable work of Jonathan Zittell Smith, a brilliant mind by any measure, should avoid so much as a mention of Weber’s name in connection with his subject. In it comparison alters focus, completely. Taking not only an expressly anthropological approach to the study of ...”

“... societies, when he was at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, the setting most recently of Jonathan Coe’s novel The Rotters’ Club.5 The last, and most famous, was the Inklings, with C.S. Lewis (‘Jack’) and Charles Williams, at Oxford in the 1930s. On this subject, Humphrey Carpenter’s 1978 study, The Inklings, last revised in 1997, is the ...”