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“... table in the main dining-room where Douglas Dillon and his wife and George Ball and his wife and Robert McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger are sitting (not eating, no dinner has arrived, no dinner will arrive), the pale linen curtains in the main dining-room blowing out, the rain on the parquet floor, the isolation, the excitement, the tropical storm. In a ...”

“... of such ci-devant Marxist historians as Hill. The other heroes of Hexter’s book, Carl Becker, Wallace Ferguson, Hiram Hayden and J.G.A. Pocock, were, I have to admit, infinitely less familiar to me. Thus it is thanks to Hexter that I have learnt that, around 1930, Becker was a relativist, just as Raymond Aron was to become one on our side of the Atlantic ...”

“... and Young and Price Waterhouse. Over Atlantic Computers, Price Waterhouse sued Touche Ross. Over Wallace Smith, KPMG sued Coopers and Lybrand. Over London United Investments, Price Waterhouse sued KPMG. Over Polly Peck, Touche Ross sued Coopers and Lybrand. Poor Coopers and Lybrand was in the soup more than once over its not altogether distinguished ...”

“... with, at the time of writing, a market capitalisation of $138 billion. Larry and Sergey, the Wallace and Gromit of the information age, are worth more than $10 billion each. Companies are a bit like people in that they tend to bear the imprint of the milieu in which they were formed. Google, spelling mistake and all, is a product of the intensely ...”

“... the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he tried to grill the Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork on his voluminous writings on constitutional law. Biden offered to resign, but Thurmond and Kennedy told him not to. Bork’s nomination was thwarted, but Biden was still chairman four years later when George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas. The ...”

“... worked with James Guthrie at the Peartree Press. She might have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called them, ‘as amorphous as friends can be’, they were nearly all highly literate, and ...”

“... at the height of Namier’s ascendancy, when such other Parliamentary historians as J. E. Neale, Wallace Notestein and W. O. Aydelotte wished humbly to import Namierism into further periods of their preoccupation’s history. (Medievalists, such as K. B. McFarlane, though naturally unwilling to admit to being Namier’s pupils, used much the same methods to ...”

“... honest account of it puts it in a good light; he miraculously manages to compare Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson with Gay to the latter’s disadvantage. Henderson is certainly not concerned to minimise the Scottishness of the ballads, but he does emphasise how close formal ‘ballad Scots’ is to ‘ballad English’, and he remarks that ‘Scots folksong ...”

“... proper fictive covering that you hide their nakedness and make them wise.’ ‘Decreation’ is Wallace Stevens’s word (taken from Simone Weil), and so, by virtue of a shared American tradition of artistic experiment, it has a rough applicability to Cage. But no amount of fictive covering by open-minded critics – and enough has been made to fill a ...”

“... Robert Lowell​ has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs out my cheek;too much live hair.Not knowing the photo of Lowell, I go instead to the picture of Seamus Heaney on the front of the companion volume to this one, New Selected Poems 1966-87, painfully young, worried-looking, Noh-rice-flour-pale, against a dark brick wall ...”

“... bank and subsequently his job as a publisher; William Carlos Williams had his medical practice; Wallace Stevens had his insurance office; Philip Larkin had his obligations as a university librarian. Auden had prose. Lots of it: several of his New Yorker reviews weigh in at well over eight thousand words, though he economised on effort, and maximised his ...”

“... At the tail-end of 1892 Robert Louis Stevenson was working on a novel. The book was going well but one thing was bothering him. Serial publication, he felt, might be difficult to secure, since ‘The Justice Clerk’ – it would eventually be published as Weir of Hermiston – was both ‘queer’ and ‘pretty Scotch ...”

“... with Shelley, and she finds among his successors Van Gogh (surprisingly but persuasively) and Wallace Stevens – the Stevens who wrote pentameters, in ‘Sunday Morning’. But this case for Browning rests on much later poems than those in these first two volumes. The young Browning was at his best when he was being sportive and audacious, formally ...”

“... the world around us. Nobody is more sensitive than Ashbery to such accidents. Ashbery has followed Wallace Stevens in centring the poems on the flow of his thought, the Niagara-like rush and hum of his brain. But being less vain and more worldly than Stevens, he has mostly avoided narcissism – unless one imagines a Narcissus whose intensity of interest in ...”

“... to withdrawal in Vietnam was meant to ‘neutralise’ supporters of the Southern Democrat George Wallace, who was trying to get the 1972 nomination. If Nixon pulled out too quickly, he warned, Wallace’s 13 per cent of the 1968 vote – he had run as an independent candidate on a segregationist ticket and split the ...”