“... regretted that I failed in those laborious 473 pages to grasp Orwell’s character as well as Mr Peter Lewis did in his recent and sprightly picture book (which, incidentally, largely reflected Sonia’s view of the true George, though no reviewers noticed this). Perhaps so. I’m only irritated that Koestler failed to notice why I was so explicitly ...”

“... Emil DuBois-Reymond. As for making his living, he ultimately settled on psychiatry after reading in Krafft-Ebing’s textbook that it was a field where theory still bore the personal stamp of the author. Jung arrived at the Burghölzli hospital on 10 December 1900. Thus began what could have been the greatest psychiatric career of the 20th ...”

“... of the genre prohibit it, and accordingly he goes round in the eminently non-Beckettian circle of reading the work off from the life and the life off from the work. The game is not worth the candle; there is nothing in any way remarkable about its resuits, apart perhaps from their often flagrantly self-contradictory character: for example, Knowlson reminds us ...”

“... to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant on her energy secretary, Peter Walker, whom she didn’t trust and feared would do ‘a fudge, like Pym and the Foreign Office in the Falklands had tried to do’. But unlike Pym, Walker kept his job, because she didn’t dare sack him. In some respects her role in the miners’ strike ...”

“... by a scholar leans towards ‘the Muse’ and away from the facts of History. There is a sense (as Peter Ackroyd cogently observed in his Life of Eliot) in which every literary biography is something of a tightrope-walk between these two poles: a sense in which, that is, all biographies are really re-interpretations on the part of each individual biographer of ...”

“... less than three months earlier by mutual friends in Oxford, where Eliot had been spending the year reading in the Bodleian and working on his Harvard doctoral dissertation in philosophy. At the time, Vivienne was a governess in Cambridge. Her family lived prosperously in London, largely off her mother’s properties in Ireland. Her father, of whom she was ...”

“... and an absence from home of several months can do funny things to one’s sense of perspective. Reading the cuts in a provincial town in a small Latin American country, it was easy to get carried away. It seemed to me then that the impossible had happened and that the unimaginable was about to happen; and all in an ‘Irish’ case, one in which the issues ...”

“... First there’s the characters’ behaviour. Some commentators, noting that Don Draper was reading Dante’s Inferno on the beach in Hawaii at the beginning of season six, have suggested a connection between Don’s adventures in subsequent episodes and the journey of Beatrice’s lover through the Underworld. But from the start no episode passes ...”

“... closest thing to a crisis in the public acceptance of Operation Desert Storm occurred when CNN’s Peter Arnett broke the rule against showing bodies, and transmitted images of Iraqi civilians killed by one of our smart bombs. Senator Simpson of Wyoming promptly labelled Arnett an Iraqi ‘sympathiser’. The criticism even extended to Ted Turner, who was ...”

“... the trials of enterprise, dynasty and corporate bureaucracy through the American 20th century. Peter Newman’s Company of Adventurers is a history of the early Hudson’s Bay Company, and here the spirit of enterprise is traced back to the origin of the Canadian nation itself. Historical narrative restores adventure to the routinised world of the modern ...”

“... parks, lakes, beaches, clean creeks and rivers, swimming and wading pools, social centres, reading rooms, clean fun, music, dance, song and joy for all. That was our Milwaukee Social Democratic movement.’ This view of life flourished and then faltered, after a sequence of events that included the introduction in the 1930s of redlining (a sort of ...”

“... let’s have us honey –‘It set the prosodic pattern,’ Berryman told the interviewer, Peter Stitt, who had been a student of his a few years earlier. The interview was conducted in a ward in St Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis, where Berryman seemed to be comfortable. He spent quite a bit of time there during the last few years of his life. In ...”

“... them, by showing them in advance how to read him superficially. It would have to be a superficial reading that perceived this novel as an anti-feminist tract. A good feminist book, according to one current dictum, is a book that inverts the feminine stereotype: instead of depicting women as passive and subordinate, as in current society and in literature they ...”

“... sort he had spent his life in search of, and also a way of rescuing his career. The problem with reading Capote’s letters and his Complete Stories is that the letters are far superior to the stories; they are better written, crisper, funnier, their world is more nuanced and realised. Of the 20 stories, 17 were written before Capote saw the news of the ...”

“... inference, in Ernest Gellner’s phrase, than in most other countries. Foucault in Veyne’s reading is more interesting, I think, than in his own writings, so Veyne can be excused for admiring him. And in any case, the main text of Comment on écrit l’Histoire comes close to being the best work on the epistemology of history ever written. It uniquely ...”