“... and a way of getting electricity from coal. He also left five million pages of papers and records. Paul Israel’s dense and sometimes exasperating book is a fine example of the ‘many worlds’ theory of biography: Edison was incontestably one of the great Victorians. The Victorian label, however, gets harder to append when it includes people who, like ...”

“... public life into privately-financed and policed spaces. But then, like the Heil Hitler salute of Dr Strangelove’s uncontrollable right hand, the triumphalist tone returns in the final pages of The American Century: Reagan may have presided over the largest peacetime expansion of the military budget in American history and then imagined that the Soviets and ...”

“... even imagine a new experience on the analogy of an earlier one possessed and remembered: if they do, they report a vision lost. Time is not for Shelley the mercy of eternity but an affront to the endlessness of desire. His poems propose relations by virtue of the mind’s typical capacity to project new instances of itself: as the fruit, in ‘The Witch of ...”

“... Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never king. Guest’s origins were anything but kingly: born in North Carolina in 1920, she was shuffled around from town to town in Florida, where her father was an ...”

“... technology could be made smaller in scale and a market could be developed for people who wanted to do the right thing. (That Fuller wasn’t much interested in smaller scales or much good at making money was somehow no obstacle to their admiration.) When the price of oil rocketed in the 1970s, mainstream America began to take seriously the counterculture’s ...”

“... moment I’m rereading The Fourth Protocol,’ she happily tells a journalist. Rereading. Jonathan Miller talks of her ‘catering to the worst elements of commuter idiocy’ and one can see what he means. Hugo Young is the best political journalist writing in Britain today, and One of Us is likely to be the standard work for quite a while to come. Some things ...”

“... Olympism,​ the strange syncretic invention of Pierre de Coubertin, drew on the baron’s misreading of the ancient games and a wilfully romantic appropriation of the English public school cult of the amateur athlete. Coubertin first called for a revival of the Olympics at a symposium at the Sorbonne in 1892, and in 1894 established the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which chose Athens as the games’ first host city ...”

“... are read all over the world while Pushkin, despite the efforts of John Fennell, Antony Wood. DM. Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, remains primarily a writer for readers of Russian. The myriad imperfections of rendering in any translation of a novel do not seriously impede what looks like genuine literary enjoyment: we weep ...”

“... this would be the way to go, petrified and put in a museum, immortal.’ Babitz thought she’d die at thirty; she’s now 78 and witnessing her own resurrection. Youth was not wasted on her, and she crammed her life into her sentences, publishing her first memoir, Eve’s Hollywood, in her early thirties. She told her biographer, Lili Anolik, that ...”

“... But his deeper and more continuous project involves a more direct (although double) question. Why do we find it so hard to understand apparently simple things, and why are our acts of understanding themselves often so hard to understand? The notion of understanding occurs in key places in the first and the last but one of the essays in Bury Place Papers, and ...”

“... on Balzac, Fredric Jameson on Conrad, Julia Kristeva on Mallarmé, Edward Said on Jane Austen, Paul de Man on Proust, Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some ...”

“... and raising the dead (John 11.1-43), but I never quite managed any of those, and had to make do with speaking in tongues (Acts 2.4), having visions (Acts 2.17) and receiving words of wisdom (1 Corinthians 12.8) instead.* I was 17 years old when I started. I was from Essex. I’d attended a comprehensive school and had ...”

“... enduring achievement of the long-dead ‘irrationalist’. His or her suggestions about what to do next will look merely quaint, but the criticisms of his or her predecessors will seem obvious. For example, everybody has doubts about the superman and the Oedipus complex, but nobody wants to revive the moral psychology which Nietzsche and Freud found in ...”

“... which has forgotten that it is rhetoric; it believes it has a theory and methods which can do more than persuade, which can, some day at least, lead us to the truth. These are heady charges. Yet, though the lines of battle have been starkly drawn, the engagements are seldom direct. Christopher Norris describes the situation perceptively in The Contest ...”

“... Winning is very important to Christopher Hitchens. Dr Johnson was said to ‘talk for victory’, and by all accounts it seems the same might be said of Hitchens. He certainly writes for victory. His preferred genre is the polemic; his favoured tone mixes forensic argument with high-octane contempt. And no one can accuse him of only picking on boys his own size: he is happy to take the ring against tubby, bespectacled former diplomats and little, shrivelled old ladies as well as (special contempt here) relatively fit joggers ...”