“... a rule be made that no chief could have a white wife. The minister for Commonwealth relations, Philip Noel-Baker, was planning a period of direct administration, and Khama was not allowed to take up the chieftaincy. In July 1949, the government set up a judicial inquiry into the matter under Justice Sir Walter Harrigan. Harrigan found that allegations that ...”

“... Marché, named after Boucicaut’s Paris store although it was founded by a Londoner called David Lewis. Between 1920 and 1924 it was given an art deco makeover and was regarded as ‘one of the finest examples of modern architecture that Liverpool possesses’. There were also Owen Owen and Lewis’s, which catered for ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... John Dos Passos, Edna St Vincent Millay and Raymond Chandler, who sacked her for calling the Philip Marlowe of The Long Goodbye ‘too Christ-like and sentimental’. She would be hard on Matthiessen’s fiction as well. On receiving 35 pages of a novel in progress, Baumgarten wrote to him: ‘Dear Peter, James Fenimore Cooper wrote this 150 years ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”