“... culture’ of the sort we nostalgically project on the 18th-century Paris salon, the 19th-century Boston drawing room, or the Manhattan loft of the 1930s, is a debatable question. What seems beyond dispute is that academic criticism is at the centre of whatever literary culture we do have at the present time. This is something to which all its opponents ...”

“... what need is there for teachers of morality or religion? Emerson, a familiar listener to the Boston liturgy written by Hazlitt’s father, took this view of the matter in his ‘Divinity School Address’. He remembered the sensation of being cooped up in the house of worship with the faithful, while outside he could see a truer subject of ...”

“... Marjorie Perloff cannot resist remarking that the dancer ‘did not know who the Lowells of Boston were, and did not fully appreciate that her lover was a Great Poet’. More to the point, perhaps, Lowell’s behaviour was not only that of a poet-king in disguise but that of a tycoon acting in the normal way. Axelrod spends much of his introductory ...”

“... suggesting that their days were as exciting as yours could become. In 1930 Rubinstein told the Boston Post: ‘Women have a duty to keep young. We should live adventurous lives, travel, work hard, earn money, spend it, love someone deeply, have children.’ She announced that she had ‘an apartment in Paris, a mansion in Mayfair, a penthouse in New York ...”

“... pounds of goods – three times the amount the Tea Partiers, also dressed as Natives, dumped into Boston harbour eight years later.After the revolution broke out, most tribes treated the conflict as a British civil war. But the results were often dire for them: the Shawnee and the Delaware were pushed west of the Mississippi; the Haudenosaunee ...”

“... about killing: Now the first guy you kill is always the hardest. I don’t care if you’re the Boston Strangler or Wyatt Earp ... Now, the second one, while it ain’t no Mardi Gras, it ain’t half as tough as the first ... The third one’s easy. It’s gotten to the point now I’ll do it just to watch their expression change. This is grisly but ...”

“... fiction was choking to death on well-made plots about the suppressed emotions of wealthy people in Boston. The time had come for novelists to shove the teacups aside and give the country a “literature of youth”, about ordinary people – poor people, people outside the cities – experiencing real emotions and expressing them in plain American ...”

“... the federation came into effect. Spencer, who left Ethiopia in 1960 to teach international law in Boston, gave no quarter in the pursuit of his client’s interests. He successfully haggled away a clear separation of jurisdictions and won predominance for Addis. In particular, he negotiated a place for a ‘crown representative’ in the Eritrean assembly who ...”

“... government; a spate of genealogically informed memoirs as part of a broader ethnic revival – Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood: The Problem of Italian Americans, for example, and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat. Capitalism turned all this into profit, initially through print publication and the rise of professional genealogy services, and on to ...”

“... is a necessary evil,’ Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses. In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann quoted Ivan Karamazov: ‘Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?’ ‘From the Urals to Donegal,’ Ellmann writes,the theme recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his ...”

“... as was only appropriate for ‘this age of improvement’. In 1868 the popular language columnist Richard White rejected a reader’s suggestion of en, from French (surprisingly not the more apt on), the virtues of which the reader had illustrated with the sentence ‘If a person wishes to sleep, en mustn’t eat cheese for supper.’ White, who favoured the ...”

“... form of American self-expression. This conviction carried him to art schools in Washington DC, Boston and Philadelphia, and briefly to Europe, on a failed odyssey to train under Oskar Kokoschka. Once he realised paintings could move, he made his first short, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), and then The Alphabet, which earned him a spot at the American ...”

“... In May 2016, Diana Craig Patch, the Met’s curator for Egyptian art, received an email from Richard Semper, a Paris-based dealer, pitching a ‘hard piece I have for sale’. It was Nedjemankh’s coffin: Semper and his partner, Christophe Kunicki, wanted €4.5 million. Kunicki is a fixture in the European art world, fêted by museum curators. He ...”

“... now having damned everyone,’ she wrote to Lowell in 1959 after she had dissed Stanley Kunitz and Richard Wilbur, ‘I feel awfully cheered up.’) ‘If you want me to,’ she went on, I’d be glad to give you more benefits of my past experience in Rimbaud-translating. (But of course not if you don’t want me to.) … Sometimes it seems to me you sort of ...”

“... her fold up her white metal cane from the Braille Institute and calls her ‘Mavis’ in a polite, Boston-bred, upper-middle-class-lesbian-daughter-in-law way – much as Mary Cheney’s lover, one imagines, addresses her in-laws as ‘Dick’ and ‘Lynne’. B. played squash at Yale – is still v. buff – and has pledged to help me push the wheelchair ...”