“... stories, old chatty novels, stage farces – not everyone would connect Jean Cocteau with Sid James and Kenneth Connor. But it is above all a novel of the Thatcher years, satirically seen as the reign of a particular mentality, easily identified, but not so easily defined. Coe portrays it through six grotesques, members of a single family, which itself is ...”

“... Sahlins) are followed by a composite chapter on the younger (now middle-aged) generation of James Clifford and George Marcus, co-editors of Writing Culture. Here the tone changes. Up to this point Kuper has been gently expository, sounding like a veteran crowd-pleasing lecturer who assumes little ...”

“... Prayer, with accompanying explanatory texts, attributed to Hendrik van den Bogaerde (1382-1469), a prior at Groenendael, near Brussels. A woodblock could print the same text multiple times, but it was laborious to carve. Individual metal types (letters or symbols) allowed for rearrangement, which made it possible, in White’s words, ‘to print an edition of ...”

“... expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a ...”

“... till thou return unto the ground.’ The New English Bible translates as ‘labour’ what King James’s scholars called ‘sorrow’ – ‘Accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it.’ A few pages later comes the very odd passage in which Noah’s son Ham sees him naked when drunk. Awakening from his ...”

“... of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright) as well as on 12 women writers. Toni Morrison (‘a child of Faulkner’) is given shorter shrift than she deserves and told off for being ideological, but some of these chapters – particularly the one on ...”

“... he married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher. A few months before the marriage, of which she had no prior knowledge, Hale deposited Eliot’s letters at Princeton. He had always insisted that they were hers to dispose of, and agreed to the terms of the deposit – not to be opened for fifty years after the death of the surviving party, as he wished. Nonetheless ...”

“... I might, for instance, have declined a supper invitation with the Impeys by quickly inventing a prior engagement with the Davidsons; but then the Impeys happened to know the Davidsons, and might discover my untruth; so, as an alibi – and this happened on one occasion – I had then to phone the Davidsons and fix up supper for the same night on which I had ...”

“... hypothesis of natural slavery, of nature’s man, must fall. Charles V was cross. He rebuked the prior of Vitoria’s house for having allowed Vitoria and his associates to ‘discuss and treat in their sermons and relectiones the right that we have in the Indies, Islands and Tierra Firme of the Ocean Sea ... for to discuss such matters without our knowledge ...”

“... spies’ who seduced secretaries in high places. Some of the intelligence passing to East Berlin prior to West German recognition of the GDR in 1972 would have been gleaned through diplomatic channels, had these existed. The great architect of Ostpolitik and the German Basic Treaty was, of course, Willy Brandt – who was brought down when it was revealed in ...”

“... Government in which he had served, perhaps this polite and diffident man had not wanted to claim prior insight into where it had all gone wrong? Mea culpa, head in hands, was always a characteristic response (or should it be pose?). Instead of trying to shift the blame onto others, he went around the country in penance for shortcomings that he ...”

“... found everywhere in American writing, from Cooper to Emerson, from Twain to Whitman, and Henry James, from Dreiser to Willa Cather and on to Mailer. Lawrence’s two Englishwomen, Lou Witt and her acerbic mother, are to be found at the end of the story in the deserts of New Mexico, where the younger woman, like the New England woman who occupied the ranch ...”

“... to acquire and preserve a face of his own’. Few Americans have faces, Auden says, citing Henry James (‘So much countenance and so little face’): ‘to have a face … one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.’ We can see why Auden was afraid of going ...”

“... Volume III brings us to the Renaissance. We notice immediately the firm direction of the editor, James McConica, who has imposed an order on the writing of the history of the University in the 16th century that is uncommon in productions by diverse hands. His long-standing interest in the social composition of Oxford, and his familiarity with some of the ...”

“... his would-be resurrectors. The same melancholy afflicts his most authoritative modern biographer, James Anderson Winn: ‘Any candid teacher of English literature must admit that many students find little pleasure or stimulation in those few selections from Dryden we now ask them to read.’ The difficulty is not confined to students, or to recent times. ‘I ...”