“... Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one of America’s largest ...”

“... lies in its anatomy of 18th-century portraiture under various heads: portraits of children, of young girls, of men of learning, of military and professional men, of actors and of women. None of these could be termed a neglected area, yet Wind constantly illuminates well-worn issues. He re-animates the tired exercise of comparing and contrasting Reynolds ...”

“... the involuted relations between generations of Stracheys themselves. The younger ones, like most young people, found the older ones exasperating, thought them benighted about life in general and especially stupid about sex. Unlike most people, however, the young Stracheys extrapolated from their own experience, casting ...”

“... her betrayal. In 1841, when Baudelaire was twenty, Aupick, deciding he’d had enough of the young poet’s wilfulness and insolence, arranged for him to take a sea voyage to Calcutta. Charles’s ‘aberrations had caused cruel anguish to his poor mother’, Aupick explained in a letter to a friend justifying the exile. But like Hamlet, Baudelaire ...”

“... as a prowler and peeping Tom during the same period, before killing and mutilating three young women in 1990. Fraser has a personal stake, in other words, in solving the conundrum. She has a solution, too: a remarkably simple one on the face of it, namely the spew of lead fumes and other toxic emissions that billowed unchecked across the region ...”

“... the vanguard of the ‘Fight for 15’, the campaign for a $15 minimum wage. Like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who have also issued loud warnings about inequality, he is heir to a long tradition of social concern among the wealthy in the US. They have reason to be worried. The last time inequality reached comparable levels was shortly before the Wall ...”

“... to decide how seriously he should take his themes. As leader of a group of expensively educated young men, Auden was protected against ‘all contact with serious critical standards’.The fact that Leavis offered the precise critical challenge didn’t mean that it was taken up in his terms, or indeed in any other terms. At a fairly early point, Auden ...”

“... could be more satisfactory to me than this.’ Despite Welty’s prompt adoption by Robert Penn Warren and the Southern Review crowd, the figure who emerges from Portor’s 1941 text is Austenish, ‘a quiet, tranquil-looking, modest girl’ who sits in a corner listening. Many years, honours, fellowships and prizes later, Paul Binding meets what is now the ...”

“... existence. The peak performer, of course, knows how to ‘get on’ with people. He can drink young white wine with the best of them in Palo Alto. But if he stands as the epitome of personal success, Garfield’s peak performer still lacks gravity. His relationship to society is instrumental at best. Freed from the ethical and political measures of ...”

“... elected governments.The men’s liberation movement emerged in the 1970s. In books like Warren Farrell’s The Liberated Man, male writers sympathetic to second-wave feminism explored the way systemic sexism affected their own wellbeing. But when feminism turned its focus towards male sexual predation and sexual harassment, some of these authors ...”

“... a woman,’ he states. All his gifts of empathy come into play when he is talking of an imaginary young woman in Roubaix in 1917, looking at the sleeping Bavarian body beside her and the ‘Gott mit uns’ belt slung over the chair and brooding on the distance which is growing between them as the war turns against Germany; when he is guessing at all the ...”

“... the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.’ To which her husband, Warren, replies: ‘I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ Home is Marilynne Robinson’s third novel; published four years after Gilead and 27 years after her astonishing debut, Housekeeping, it explores with unsparing precision ...”

“... can’t be blamed really for not having the ability to imagine how nostalgia, brilliant clothes, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway and some fancy editing would elevate nihilistic murderous young couples into cultural icons for the 20th century, while a quietly seething poisoner would look dreary and unstylishly old hat. In this ...”

“... in his two great decades. Neither Leavis nor Empson was conspicuously successful in discovering young talent: during World War Two Empson was for a time passionately enthusiastic about the mild romantic verse of Sidney Keyes. In America, Wilson seems in later years to have sensed that the youthful Randall Jarrell might emulate his discernment of the ...”

“... solution to the Irish problem. From the start they had little patience with what Warren Fisher, Head of the Civil Service between the wars, described as the ‘blackmail and bluff (oddly enough called loyalty)’ consistently deployed by the then Northern Ireland Government. Fisher prescribed a dose of reality for these ‘parochial ...”