“... Most of the pieces begin by quoting an entire poem, which is then set up against a big concept (William Cowper’s poem on the death of one of his pet hares is discussed under the aspect of ‘charm’), so you get the idea that reading poems isn’t just about counting syllables or tum-tumming along in your head, but can be a kind of thinking, or a way of ...”

“... developed in several of the chapters.’ The defence sounds like an academic version of Wallace Stevens’s poetic project of arriving at insights through circularities rather than continuities of exploration, repeated affrays from various angles which precede the homing-in. McGann himself looks to Blake, whose ‘habit of returning to the same ...”

“... innovation of constructing an interlocking system of classes, terms and names was so significant, William Whewell argued in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), that modern systemic science could be said to begin with Linnaeus. Whewell wrote at a time when a wide variety of new lexical systems had been accepted as the matrices of scientific ...”

“... work whilst men and women unite in joyous and creative human pastimes. It is a prospect to make William Morris’s mind reel, publishers quail. But who are, or were, the Khazars? ‘An autonomous and powerful tribe, a warlike and nomadic people who appeared from the East at an unknown date, driven by a scorching silence, and who, from the seventh to the ...”

“... but, unlike hanging, it does not necessarily concentrate it. I not long ago read the letters of Wallace Stevens, that highly cerebral poet, who, in these letters, again and again cautions against reading too much. Stevens felt that too much reading left too little time for thinking. In part, no doubt, he had in mind the kind of thinking that a serious poet ...”

“... the Welsh poet and editor Keidrych Rhys, at a Poetry London event. (Rhys had been christened William Ronald Rees Jones, but renamed himself after a river near his home.) After their wedding the couple moved to the village of Llanybri; they would divorce a decade later. For a period Roberts found herself living in a caravan with two toddlers in a ...”

“... with the Lower Boys; it was to them that, by way of encouraging literary pursuits, he read Edgar Wallace in his drawing-room. Nothing can be more certain than that all these proceedings were conducted with complete propriety. Yet there was, perhaps, something injudicious about them. It was, for instance, at the age of 13 that Jo Grimond, plied with claret ...”

“... and with different timbres, this refrain has been part of the Joe McCarthy movement, the George Wallace campaign and every Republican surge from Nixon to Gingrich. (But let’s not be too partisan about it; the rhetoric evolved from the days when the Ku Klux Klan and the Southern Democratic Party were each other’s official and provisional wings.) As ...”

“... human oddity, not from authorial freakishness or ludic obstructionism (as in, say, David Foster Wallace). For one thing, Means has a geography and a landscape, to which he ceaselessly returns, and which grounds much of his work: the Michigan where he was born and raised. Again and again he hovers over the appalling emptiness of the Midwestern plains: the ...”

“... racism, given at a 1943 New York rally on a bill with Paul Robeson and Vice-President Henry Wallace. Welles’s debut as a political orator was as sensational in its way as his first forays into theatre and the movies. ‘Until the other day,’ the New Yorker noted, ‘we regarded Orson Welles as simply an ...”

“... future citizen of Soviet America’.After twelve issues, two of the young editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, appalled by the Moscow show trials of 1936 and 1937, wrested the magazine from party control. The new PR emerged in December 1937. F.W. Dupee, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy were also on the masthead, as was George L.K. Morris, artist, art ...”

“... in a corporate society. At Harvard, he was, at different times, an assistant and acolyte to William James and George Santayana, and he came to believe that reality was something one had to fight for, that personality and expertise had their parts to play, and that ‘psychology mattered in politics.’ He wanted to see what the papers were saying but ...”

“... bystander. Sometimes words simply fail, or at best achieve a lapidary eloquence. Here’s William Tildesley, a 17th-century diarist: ‘June 15, In great payne; June 16, In paines alover; June 17, In great payne.’ And such mute ness may help to explain why many codes of conduct – Stoicism is the obvious example – have prescribed dignified ...”

“... of the wistfulness and nostalgia that pervaded his previous book, this one was reminiscent of William Faulkner in his demonic vein. Employing several narrators, including ventriloquised historical figures, it told of a criminal gang that set slaves free, only to capture them again for profit. Lowboy, set in present-day New York, describes the disturbing ...”

“... Richardson resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s order to fire Cox; Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, followed. Eventually Robert Bork, the solicitor-general and next in the chain of command at Justice, sacked Cox. Ziegler announced the abolition of the special prosecutor’s office. But the public outcry at the ‘Saturday Night ...”