“... of Communism the emergence of Senator McCarthy; the Civil Rights movement; Vietnam; the return of Richard Nixon; Watergate – it is all there, introduced with a swift and studied casualness. ‘Meanwhile, the war in Europe ends, the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, then Nagasaki ... ’ Meanwhile? I suppose there is a blurry sort of truthfulness in this ...”

“... of their seniors in Sovietology appeared not to believe it.Born in 1917 to an American father and English mother, public-school and Oxford-educated, Robert Conquest made his first substantial contacts with the Soviet Union through his work in British intelligence during and after the Second World War. His first-hand sustained observation of communism in ...”

“... protected the man from any possibility of worldly success. Puffed up with some redundant middle-English middle name (like those cricketers whose superfluous initials signal careers of fretful indecision), Penman might have been tempted by hubris. He could have come to believe, along with Julie Burchill, who kicks in an Introduction to Vital ...”

“... will to literature received its fullest critical acknowledgment in the period between Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of Joyce and Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). Kenner’s book, based in part on interviews with Pound, presents itself as a parting glimpse of an age of demi-gods. It marvellously exhibits, by a vivid survey of ...”

“... stood passive and bit his nails.’ But it was Nijinsky and Diaghilev who shared the new vision. Richard Buckle, Nijinsky’s biographer, describes what they were after: Fokine had rebelled against the academic dance, throwing out tutus, turn-out, and virtuosity for its own sake ... Diaghilev foresaw a dead-end to the ballet of local colour and the ...”

“... Kaplan confesses in the prelude to his ambitious biography of Gore Vidal. Kaplan, a professor of English in New York whose taxidermies include Henry James, Dickens and Carlyle (they hardly get deader than Carlyle), understands that it’s much easier to get the paperwork done if you don’t have the living-breathing item second-guessing you at every turn or ...”

“... for all occasions. My Good News Bible was translated from the original tongues into ‘today’s English’ and featured many curious, faceless line drawings of biblical scenes. (Years later, piously learning French, I bought myself a French Bible, Le Nouveau Testament illustré en français courant, and was amazed to find the same illustrations, like a ...”

“... stretching from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger to Wittgenstein, Adorno, Benjamin and Richard Rorty, who can say what they mean only by forging a new style of writing, one which dismantles the traditional opposition between literature and philosophy, the aesthetic and the analytic. These thinkers cobble together ...”

“... In April​ 2022, Justin Trudeau watched Richard Baker, the 39th governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, hand over ownership of its ornate department store in Winnipeg to the local First Nations. The ceremonial was Hanoverian, with Baker and Grand Chief Jerry Daniels trading pelts and a gold coin, but the rhetoric was that of postcolonial reconciliation ...”

“... keep an eye out for her.’ The ‘her’ in question is an old flame, probably his English former fiancée, Beryl Eeman; Berryman wants her to know that he is now fêted in Tokyo and Paris and that his New York and London publishers forward him ‘elephant cheques’. Should she want to get in touch …What makes for​ a good Dream Song? As ...”

“... well, very beautiful and far more able than he is to speak about Pasternak’s work. Shilov’s English has that mixture of hesitation and surge normally associated with high-wire artists. At the end of every successfully negotiated sentence, he smiles like a performer being judged – radiant with nerves. As a diplomat, he is masterly. Faced with a ...”

“... a part of the coastline which hasn’t yet been ‘polluted’ by the ‘Parisians and the English and Americans’. Between Saint-Raphaël and Saint-Tropez, by contrast, the rich forest land is currently being cleared for winter resorts. Here, for instance, is Saint-Aygulf, designed to attract successful artists from Paris; as yet unbuilt, but with ...”

“... between 1990 and 2009 found that 90.5 per cent of them were Deobandis. The would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid had Deobandi connections, as did the 2006 transatlantic airline bomb plotters and two of the 7/7 attackers. As Deobandis sometimes rather wearily point out, these concerns are not new. In 1875, less than ten years after the movement was founded, Sir ...”

“... Music at Darmstadt and the music he heard there – by Pierre Boulez, Edgard Varèse and the English twelve-tone composer Humphrey Searle, among others – made him feel sick. And while he recognised Coltrane’s improvisational genius, to Shankar’s ears the turbulence of the music opened a voyeuristic window into a troubled mind. The Indian classical ...”

“... at the Hôtel Palais Royal on the same street. For a time she studied French literature and gave English lessons. But in 1917, by which time she could see bombing raids from the hotel balcony, she signed up as a farmhand. In October, she came back to the city. She was looking for a copy of the journal Vers et Prose when she crossed the Seine to visit ...”