“... 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 ...”

“... like an evasion, a tricksy manoeuvre by Coetzee to sidestep saying what he ‘really’ believed. Peter Singer, one of Coetzee’s designated respondents, was particularly exasperated: ‘I prefer to keep truth and fiction clearly separate.’ Others saw it as an effective polemical gesture, concisely articulating the proposition that ideas are always an ...”

“... wry, informed and deliberately informal, could agree to collaborate on it, and make it worth reading. Together, the two Irish writers connect Heaney’s poems with the people, places, books and songs that he has known.Songs matter more than you might think; so do some places, especially California, and so, by the end, do the mixed blessings of fame. The ...”

“... contact with another. He evolved from that sense of dislocation his theory of ‘contrapuntal’ reading, put forward in his essay ‘Reflections on Exile’: Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an ...”

“... is erratically revived: ‘He went home and spent the remainder of the day eating, sleeping, reading, vilifying his children and practising desultorily on the French horn.’ Later in the same book, Frequent Hearses, Fen laments the arrival of the long vacation because there will be no demands on his time. The happily married detective is a dull ...”

“... of early 1960s London. Maverick, ambitious and something of a fantasist, he was a co-owner with Peter Cook of Private Eye and the Establishment Club in Soho. He was also a habitué of John Aspinall’s gambling club, the Clermont, which became the fulcrum of Lucan’s life after he left the bank. When Lucan disappeared the ‘Clermont set’ loomed large in ...”