“... reader’s. He was prepared to indulge in a kind of crazed fusion of the two in his commentary on Eugene Onegin, and to parody that madness in Pale Fire. When in his afterword to Lolita he defined his ideal of ‘aesthetic bliss’ in literature he was speaking as a reader and a writer – to be precise as ‘neither a reader nor a writer of didactic ...”

“... a slower wavelength he named delta which characterised deep sleep. Kleitman and his new assistant, Eugene Aserinsky, used the EEG to investigate narcolepsy and to study the phenomenon of rapid eye movement in certain phases of sleep. The wandering of eyes under their lids had typically been seen as a sign that a fitful sleeper was on the point of waking, but ...”

“... the race in the middle of primary season; after a strong challenge from the anti-Vietnam candidate Eugene McCarthy and facing dissent in his party, he became convinced he wasn’t going to win. Then Robert F. Kennedy, one of three main Democratic contenders (alongside McCarthy and the vice president, Hubert Humphrey), was assassinated, only two months after ...”

“... retailed with rapt pedantry – is inconceivable without Joyce’s example: ‘A young woman in a black dress, with a shiny forehead and quick, wandering eyes, sat down at his feet for the eighth time, sideways on a stool, numbly extracted a narrow shoe from the rustling interior of its box, spread her elbows apart as she slackened the edges, glanced ...”

“... critic.’ A few years later Styron wrote about his bout with what Churchill called ‘the black dog’ in a memoir, originally published in Vanity Fair, called Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990). It was an instant bestseller with staying power. ‘Curious to think that a slender little volume about lunacy may provide a meal ticket for my ...”

“... discovers ‘a packet of mail’ where I see a wrapped brie or camembert with the maker’s name, Eugene Martin, prominently displayed. It may be a parcel, of course. Without looking at the original, it is impossible to be certain, though even in reproduction the label looks printed rather than hand-printed like an address. At any rate, a parcel wouldn’t ...”

“... argument. First, we have Booth’s colour-coded map of London (gold for wealthy districts, black for poor), in which the social classes are often separated only by the width of a street or a block. Alongside Booth, we have Moretti’s cartography of the fictional city, as represented, for instance, by that quintessentially 19th-century genre, the ...”

“... of the celebrated Agrarian manifesto, I’ll take my stand (1930), and even told Ralph Ellison and Eugene Walter in 1957 that this unreadiness had been an ‘objective’ fact in 1929. The posture does Warren an injustice. The early statement is less crudely inhumane than it is made to seem, and the subsequent record is honourable. But the mental set ...”

“... of the stories in Small Circle of Beings (1988). (Coetzee’s first novel begins: ‘My name is Eugene Dawn. I cannot help that.’) But while his reports on the post-apartheid state of the nation are clearly in dialogue with such novels as Disgrace, they project a more expansive world of Galgut’s own, using charged male friendships as well as sex with ...”

“... of breath’. But for me – I take my cue from a scholar who discusses this material, Eugene Wang – the figures whose presence on the banner goes on attracting my attention are a handful of dead individuals setting out on the journey, along the very first yards of the dragon-tail way. ‘Dishevelled’, Wang calls them. Possessed of an unkempt ...”

“... has gotten sort of ratty looking, my face dull and sallow, and my front teeth have two visible black cavities that I am too lifeless to have fixed’) and through literary self-disembowelment: in 1951, at the height of his powers, he called ‘the experience of reading over’ a new version of Summer and Smoke ‘a staggering blow’. His ...”

“... journalism school at Columbia; a Stanford-educated punk-rocker and veteran magazine editor called Eugene Robinson. The only white guy was a self-effacing Rhodes scholar. My stories would round out the team, they said, and, it was implied, so would I, an Indian-American woman. They offered me twice the money I could make as a freelancer as well as good health ...”

“... inscribed on his coffin. ‘If there is any single thing that explains either of us,’ he said to Eugene O’Neill, ‘it’s that we’re Irish.’ Ford’s great discovery was that many of the citizen soldiers who fought in the American Revolution were Irish immigrants: a finding, McBride writes, that ‘roused in him a vital connection to American history ...”

“... he would be waiting at a restaurant on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, easy to spot with his black hair and red and black checked shirt. Kerouac had a winning sweetness and an obsession with writing that no girl working half-secretly on her first novel could resist. She was bowled over by his physical beauty, and ...”

“... Academy’s summer exhibitions in order to see ‘those beautiful shiny portraits of gentlemen in black velvet waistcoats, with their fists doubled up on round tables, or marble slabs … and all the ladies who are playing with little parasols, or little dogs, or little children’, in the words of Miss La Creevy in his novel. In 1839 he was able to admire ...”