“... sat in the main booth with her friends, looking serene and detached, while all sorts of people took their time collecting their hats or whatever, and rubbernecking shamelessly.What was this? It was more than fame and more than glamour. And it was a bit less than Edmund Burke’s fierce gallantry on glimpsing the figure of Marie Antoinette. Yet there was ...”

“... Of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul? Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow Near the end of The Great Gatsby Nick Carraway suddenly says: ‘I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all.’ It is a comment which might be made about American literature as a whole: writing about America turns out to be, in one way or another, writing about ‘the West ...”

“... by Thomas Hodge is the first into English. We can see on every page why Aksakov’s contemporaries took his book to heart. Turgenev, for instance, said: ‘This is real Russian speech: general and direct, supple and deft. There is nothing strained and nothing sluggish.’ In his own Notes of a Hunter (1852) Turgenev is bravely liberal. Aksakov’s politics are ...”

“... his letters he neither drafted nor amended. His more formal autobiographical writings show that he took prose seriously, and for all their unpremeditated air the letters are often excellent examples of vivid informal prose. A master of language, he was, whether or not he sought to be, expert in what Dryden called ‘the other harmony’. In addition to the ...”

“... can in part be explained by the fury of that schism. The war between Christ and Antichrist took many forms, including village squabbles where the wretched were suspected of bewitching the righteous for revenge and gain. The accused were typically women, usually older and dependent on their communities. Around 25,000 witches were executed in early ...”

“... On voting day I took the Melbourne tram downtown, stopping only to glance in a bookseller’s window. It was good to see Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore holding its place in the bestseller list. 1 A good cop yarn set in Victoria, stylistically it is West Coast American, and has been received well there. But that’s not why it’s so popular here ...”

“... of life.’ Barker’s precocity was impressive, and attracted the attention and patronage of John Middleton Murry, T.S. Eliot and Edwin Muir. Murry gave the 19-year-old poet two books to review for the Adelphi on the strength of some pages of diary (later worked up into the first novel) and Barker had published in New Verse, Criterion and the Listener at ...”

“... have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at 1.5 kilos and a thousand pages. A great virtue of John Keegan’s is its brevity. Here is the saga in miniature. Keegan’s Churchill is pre-eminently a man of war and a man of words. The Army made him physically, intellectually and morally – Sandhurst and the years in India and Africa ‘must be counted among ...”

“... he appears before me, I could not stop myself kissing him.’ Unlike his tight-fisted father, King John, Henry was generous to a fault, showering all around him with precious rings, brooches, luxurious robes, huge consignments of firewood and deer from his forests. The gifts he received from others he regifted, also on a heroic scale. When he ran out of cash ...”

“... writer), and a tiring friend, because he wanted to talk and to drink all night. Lévi-Strauss took in the ideas, but without the vodka – this proved a let-down to his exuberant associate. Jakobson lived, taught and published in the United States for forty more years after this, first at Columbia and later at Harvard. He made constant raids out of ...”

“... which her lover made it clear that he visited her only for occasional ‘relief’. Presently she took off for Paris, and he yearned to follow her, when he could find the money, to establish a proper romantic liaison. Before he could get there, however, after the gambling episode at Baden, Apollinaria had fallen into the arms of a handsome young Spanish ...”

“... Grimm that was fashioned only for the smallest and most enlightened of readerships. But Diderot took no care at all to have it ready for publication. His manuscript was sent off to Catherine the Great with the rest of his library after his death and only re-emerged in the 1970s. And it is simply nothing like a novel. The book’s dialogues float free of ...”

“... 51 when he won, but by 1988 already the author of his major works. The Foundation nonetheless took a big punt on the genius of Richard Powers, who was awarded his MacArthur in 1989, aged only 32. I haven’t checked, but he is probably the youngest novelist ever to win a fellowship. Generally unknown in 1989, and temperamentally reticent, he has lately ...”

“... friend’s toy boy: ‘She says she found him in Sun Valley, but I’m still betting that she took him out of a tree. He’s awful + behaves like a bad waiter.’He kept a tight rein on feelings, which is why song was so crucial to his mental balance. Only in a few passages, such as his detailed description of seeing the casts come off his shattered legs ...”

“... authority he could find. ‘He was Christ revisited,’ remarked an Australian actress he briefly took up with. On occasion Dylan himself explicitly tried on the martyr’s role: ‘I have a death-thing, I know ...’ he told his official biographer Robert Shelton in one of his more revealing interviews, as if confiding to an apostle. The concerts themselves ...”