“... of Lennon’s ample and very loyal biography may have something to do with that: the sense – Virginia Woolf’s sense, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s, and Dostoevsky’s – that nobody is simply one thing. Some people write biographies, you suspect, as a way of not writing about themselves. Lennon’s book is good in that way, in the ...”

“... origin story’ for the US, one that begins with the arrival of a ship in the British colony of Virginia with a cargo of twenty enslaved African people. The book itself is the culmination of a project by the New York Times Magazine, marking four hundred years since that first slave ship arrived in America. It attempted to show that ‘the inheritance of ...”

“... blurbs the likes of which you’ve never seen before. ‘A marvel,’ Marlon James says. Daisy Johnson tells us that ‘Vuong is rewriting what fiction is supposed to be’ and – forgetting the medium – that ‘it’s a privilege to watch.’ ‘Thank you, Ocean Vuong,’ Michael Cunningham chimes, ‘for this brilliant and remarkable first ...”

“... intimates, the Webbs and Wells, and had a joky intimacy with persons as diverse as Lady Astor, Virginia Woolf and the heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. He was sporadically in touch, affectionate and censorious, with Mrs Patrick Campbell, and kept a kindness for scapegraces such as Lord Alfred Douglas and Frank Harris, in whose biography of Shaw the subject ...”

“... his marriage. He is not the first to have done so: he acknowledges and borrows from Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s Marina and Lee, though he is able to add to that mostly American account thanks to the KGB transcripts. The newly married couple’s apartment was bugged, and their early married life, their frequent strife and their makings-up, are ...”

“... players advanced. 21 Your average fan: under his cap a squeamish lip and a strong whiff of Virginia smoke. But now, his lips unclench, his pipe’s withdrawn; another minute, mouth’s agape; another and he is howling. Hands by the hundreds victory inciting: an artful player propels the ball, darts like a swallow the field’s full length, two men rush ...”

“... rival factions in the intelligence community: the ‘tree of smoke’ that, for the novelist Denis Johnson, symbolised CIA operations in Vietnam. I inhaled that smoke myself in 1969-70, when I was a cryptographer with a Top Secret clearance on a US navy ship that carried missiles armed with nuclear warheads – the existence of which the navy denied. I was ...”

“... foremost literary shrew’. She was a strong, funny critic. She lost patience with Virginia Woolf’s novels (‘too devastatingly vague’) on discovering that ‘she thought you need a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne.’ Henry Miller was ‘no sensualist. He might have made a mechanical engineer.’ Monogamy didn’t suit women ...”

“... predictable; they follow a script.’ The number-crunching core of her case is the work done by a Virginia-based non-profit called the Centre for Systemic Peace, which gives countries a ‘polity score’ on a 21-point scale ranging from minus 10 to plus 10. Any country that scores plus 6 or more is deemed democratic, minus 6 or less, autocratic. Countries in ...”

“... of the truth after an era of lies and fictions is itself a pleasure – the mind, as Dr Johnson indicated, delighting to rest on the stability of truth. Both writers appear to have a strong sense of the paradoxical – or perhaps it is merely that the paradoxes that appear in the investigation of men’s treatment of women demand recognition. Susan ...”

“... dictionary and its supplements, satirically underscored by the lament of Stephen’s daughter Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas that ‘it is much to be regretted that no lives of maids . . . are to be found’. In the 63 volumes published by 1901, only about 4 per cent of subjects are female, and even the most recent supplementary volume (on the first ...”

“... involuntarily reminded of four African slaves in the marketplace. And my thoughts would revert to Virginia and Carolina.’ By this date, the Atlantic slave trade had been abolished in both the US and the British Empire (it persisted much longer in Brazil), but Britain was ahead in emancipation, having voted, in 1833, to abolish slavery in most of its ...”

“... from superpower status. Underneath the dreadful images lie these enormous strategic choices. R.W. Johnson Durban The thousands who died in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania were people of all races, faiths, classes, nationalities. We in Israel have mourned them; many of us have mourned for NYC as part of our real life, unlike Khartoum or ...”

“... last unlocked the puzzle and allowed me to read the full title: IOHNSON/DICKTYON/ARY. It is Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary. A huge, very expensive, very prestigious publication. It’s fascinating to know that Williams owned this book – and is here associating himself intellectually with Samuel Johnson, the opponent of ...”

“... system to competition, companies from Ohio, Nebraska, Texas, Georgia, Colorado, Louisiana and Virginia spent £10 billion buying up British firms. As the Americans began to flood in, Labour took over from the Conservatives, and Gordon Brown slapped a windfall tax of £1.5 billion on the electricity firms as punishment for their excess profits. It was easy ...”