“... According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot, the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes of Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors ...”

“... Jameson points out in this monumental study. On the contrary, he discerned in it a messianic power to disrupt the present. Even so, he treats it with a certain Judaic wariness: you are forbidden to carve graven images of the future because to do so is to use it as a fetish or totem to manipulate the present. Just as you cannot name God, so you cannot put ...”

“... biography and manner have called to mind I.B. Singer and, in the most recent Zuckerman novel, Henry Roth. But Philip Davis, Bernard Malamud’s first biographer, persuasively argues that the house, the wife, the joylessness and the drive are all echt Malamud. ‘If you think of me sitting at my desk, you can’t be wrong,’ Malamud once wrote to a friend ...”

“... It was very unfair to those young men.’ John Henry Newman’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 shattered the intellectual credit of the Oxford Movement. The long struggle – first from the pulpit of the University Church of St Mary, later through the radical pages of Tracts for the Times – to state the case for the Apostolic authority of the Anglican church had ended, as the Movement’s critics had always predicted, in total surrender to Catholic dogma ...”

“... to give an accurate representation of society. By this he did not mean some failure of imaginative power: he meant that they got their facts wrong. Moreover, they (Dickens again being the main culprit) went beyond the proper remit of fiction: they were guilty of ‘using novels to ventilate opinions’ and their opinions were of the ...”

“... populist rage over immigration; an anachronistic constitutional order that gives far too much power to small states. All these accounts have a grain of truth, but none captures the full dimensions of America’s crisis, which is not merely political but spiritual, the latest chapter in an older struggle over what sort of country it wants to be ...”

“... conflicts. ‘It seems extremely doubtful,’ he wrote, ‘whether Burke and his friends, if in power, would have succeeded in saving the First British Empire. Their ideas were no less hierarchical and authoritarian than those of George III and Lord North ... had Burke been in office during the American Revolution, we might merely have had to antedate his ...”

“... body-building exercises prompt him to re-examine his adolescent dreams of strength and power. For the sequels, Desert Divers (1990) and Exterminate All the Brutes (1992), he goes to Africa and reflects on his own identity, not in the context of a European homeland, but in relation to the dislodged ‘fragments of childhood’ that come to mind as ...”

“... also discusses Nkrumah’s diplomatic failures – not least his decision to put Major General Henry Templer Alexander, a British officer appointed as Ghana’s interim chief of defence, in charge of overseeing Accra’s diplomatic mission to Léopoldville. Alexander didn’t speak French; he was close to the American ambassador, Clare Hayes ...”

“... pauses at one point in his verse autobiography to sound the note in his own way: ‘Of genius, power,/Creation and divinity itself/I have been speaking, for my theme has been/What passed within me.’ Rarely can such weight have fallen on those formerly unostentatious words ‘within’ and ‘me’. It’s not so far from that to the stylishly belligerent ...”

“... and the punched paper rolls they require. There are assets involved, liabilities and potentially power struggles of the sort familiar from Louis Auchincloss’s novels published decades before JR and decades after it, as well as from soap operas like Dallas: ‘If instead of Stella holding 25 shares against my 23 it turns out that her and Edward split that ...”

“... essence of the writers’ work. The cities both disabled them and gave them an immense imaginative power, poisoned them and nourished them, made their spirits playful but made two of them lock away some of their best work, allow it to gather dust. The sense that there was no one much to read the work these writers were producing ate its way into the tone and ...”

“... the same story in different settings. On hearing the word ‘commitment’, she sought refuge in Henry James (an odd hero for a writer whose sentences are so unencumbered and who was also besotted by Elmore Leonard), but she was happy to be accused of consistency: she believed in the salutary power of memory, and the value ...”

“... fine words were spoken at the initial flag-raising and gunfire, they masked the workings of power which overreached all humane intentions.At that rate, the 200th anniversary might properly be marked by a lowering of flags, Last Posts, and salutations toward long-obliterated graves. Most black citizens and increasingly numerous white ones know it, with ...”

“... vision of the way the world works. It substitutes the facticity and malign power of a single commodity for the more complex and partly non-factual imperatives of capital accumulation. Almost invariably, this line of argument turns on a plotting of personal connections, Big Oil business networks, and the revolving door of ...”