“... in the competition.) Entitled ‘The Hell It Can’t’, the story was intended to rebuke Sinclair Lewis’s Popular Front novel It Can’t Happen Here. I once went to the labour of digging up this un-anthologised tale, which describes an episode of vicious fascist violence, and could see in it, if I chose, premonitions of Bellow’s later impatient ...”

“... conversation) that he has never been introduced to Woolf’s work: ‘My book’s sub-plot is Philip K. Dick, sales-talk, Hollywood and schitzophrenia.’ So I’m forced to describe Woolf in terms of Dick’s excellent ‘straight’ novels of the sliding life in the Western States, In Milton Lumky Territory and Humpty Dumpty in Oakland. The keenest ...”

“... of oppressive respectability. Some instances of slumming can, of course, be furnished: C. Day Lewis was free to write detective fiction under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake and so not soil the reputation of the serious poet. Pseudonymy is essentially a disguise, a device for throwing readers off the scent. For absolute security’s sake the choice of ...”

“... turned fast and reckless. ‘Go ahead is our maxim and our password,’ the New York politician Philip Hone wrote in 1837. ‘We go ahead with a vengeance, regardless of the consequences and indifferent about the value of human life.’ Most contemporaries were more exuberant about the American ‘passwords’: get ahead, go ahead, ascend, succeed and ...”

“... shit does not fall under my job description’. So off she jolly well goes to John Lewis and buys a fascinator because apparently, ‘in hat land, such as Royal Ascot’, these are frowned on. On the day, however, it pours with rain. Rose Paterson, wife of Owen Paterson, the Northern Ireland secretary, whom Swire dislikes because she is an ...”

“... in mind – feature in practically every round-up of suspects: figures such as Clement Greenberg, Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling. But outdoing them all in his credentials for the title-role is Wilson, the freelance writer who never held a regular academic position and who, it is claimed, wrote authoritatively on questions of literature, culture and ...”

“... from her husband an executive order barring discrimination in defence employment, and so avert A. Philip Randolph’s threatened mass march on Washington. (Randolph was President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping-Car Porters; here, and not as objects of Sumner Welles’s desire, lies the political significance of these black workers.) The young man with whom ...”

“... think I am temperamentally a mystic, he says. He believes Wordsworth and Blake and George Fox and Philip K. Dick. But he excludes from the dimension of greater meaning the ascetic practices of the modern day. We engage in them, certainly: ‘hot yoga, ceaseless meditation, extreme fasting, various forms of detox, excessive exercise and compulsive devotion to ...”

“... poems appeared he appalled friends by marrying Jane, the daughter of a stable keeper, and then got Philip Webb to build the Red House for his family just south of London. Although once canonised as the first modernist dwelling on account of its simple layout and truth to materials, Morris described it as ‘very medieval in spirit’. Perhaps too ...”

“... Park, and is, coincidentally, where Willa Cather also came to summer with her partner, Edith Lewis. Yourcenar and Frick’s white clapboard house with black shutters was surrounded by trees and filled with old things, such as Delft tiles and Indonesian tapestry, as well as hundreds of books arranged by century. From 1951 it was Yourcenar’s permanent ...”

“... Said made plain that he saw many of the best-known scholars of the Middle East, notably Bernard Lewis, as heirs of 19th-century Orientalism – and as apologists for, if not servants of, a new imperialism.The value of Said’s book was immediately evident to intellectuals who felt their treatment by Western scholarship had been no less punishing. ‘You are ...”

“... my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it with contempt. ‘Hypertrophic . . . A ...”

“... Tennyson knew this particular story. Do you read through every book given to you as a present? Philip Larkin, reviewing Ricks’s 1969 edition, singled out the lines ‘O why have they not buried me deep enough’ as shapeless and unrhythmical; he managed to find a Larkinesque side of Tennyson to admire (‘Northern Farmer, New Style’), but the general ...”

“... but their fears of becoming the dupes of a sinister literary plot now seem exaggerated. Philip Toynbee, for example, who declared that he had never really been taken in for a minute, his scepticism having been awakened early on by the frontispiece (you can’t get much earlier in a book than its frontispiece), obviously had been taken in and felt ...”

“... of the letter-opener handle protruding from his chest appears in this volume of the papers.) John Lewis, aspiring divinity student from the backwoods of Alabama – subsequently head of SNCC and now a Congressman from Georgia – makes his first appearance in King’s world. And Ezell Blair Jr, a high-school youth from Greensboro, North Carolina writes to ...”