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“... for American writers who prefer the national mannerism of the barbaric yawp. Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Rush are exact contemporaries, born in 1933. McCarthy excels at antique dialogue and rapturous word-pictures of frontier landscapes; likes to portray violence; won’t represent thought; can’t do women; and has denounced Henry James and the ...”

“... Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s ...”

“... We’ – meaning Americans – ‘are now in an energy crisis.’ A few days later Vice-President Dick Cheney, like Bush a Texas oil industry veteran, announced a new American policy of generating more energy, rather than conserving existing supplies, and predicted that the US would need between 1300 and 1900 new power stations in the next twenty years, most ...”

“... a much more effective shield than is secrecy.’ And there are other, more subtle stratagems. Philip Roth once talked about writers of fiction as playing ‘the what-if game’: unless he’s content to sit like a spider in the middle of a novel-about-a-novel-about-a-novel, the writer is inevitably engaging in spreadsheeted counterfactuals about what life ...”

“... for what is truly human and pathetic is one of the exemplary myths of our time.’ The architect Philip Johnson and Alfred Barr of MoMA were among his buyers. ‘Without exhibiting or even being thought of as a serious artist,’ the Artforum reviewer said, Warhol had ‘developed new work over the past two years in almost total seclusion’. As Gopnik puts ...”

“... elaborate routines to avoid or to ambush and take by surprise troublesome consonants, of which K is one of the most difficult. It’s a good job Kafka didn’t stutter. With two Ks he might have got started on his name and never seen the end of it. As it is, he docks it, curtails it, leaves its end behind much as lizards ...”

“... of the wilderness years was shared by Mitchell’s colleagues. ‘Why didn’t he write more?’ Philip Hamburger, one of Mitchell’s friends at the New Yorker, asked. ‘Well, he wrote enough.’ The great bulk of Mitchell’s work can be found in the 718-page omnibus volume, Up in the Old Hotel, published by Pantheon four years before Mitchell’s ...”

“... in and of itself, will generate activity in the rest of the economy. The process is explained in Philip Coggan’s excellent primer on the City, The Money Machine (2002). Imagine, for the purpose of keeping things simple, a country with only one bank. A customer goes into the bank and deposits £200. Now the bank has £200 to invest, so it goes out and buys ...”

“... its big names too: Paul Mason from Newsnight, Suzanne Moore from the Mail on Sunday, the novelist Philip Hensher. Some people refuse to stand on an IoI platform, considering them clandestine and creepy. Others are a bit doubtful, but take part in the events in the interests of free debate. Others again want the exposure and don’t care about the IoI’s ...”

“... much she could have said to them, but she had met T.S. Eliot, too, and there was Priestley and Philip Larkin and even Ted Hughes, to whom she’d taken a bit of a shine but who remained nonplussed in her presence. And it was because she had at that time read so little of what they had written that she could not find anything to say and they, of course, had ...”

“... But what can you say about your own life to someone on the brink of theirs? I didn’t cry when Philip died either. I’d seen him shrivel into a brown husk, the taut dry skin stretched over his skeleton like a mummified body excavated from some desert tomb. I’d seen him in his wheelchair with an oxygen mask clamped to his face, his eyes rotating ...”

“... take a vacant place at a poker game, say, and raise no eyebrows, which someone called … oh, Philip, say, couldn’t.’ At this a woman in front turned round. ‘I called him Philip.’ Then turning to her neighbour. ‘He said that was what he felt like inside.’ ‘I called him Bunny,’ said a man on the aisle and ...”