“... these letters underscore the significance of her rejection of a literary life and her refusal to foster a public image. Although she had acquaintances in the literary world (her correspondents included H.G. Wells, Bryher, H.D. and John Cowper Powys), most of her life was lived in obscurity, and her friendships were mainly epistolary ones. Her aversion to ...”

“... glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic struck them as fairly accurate ...”

“... turned, from which some semblance of pre-modern Gemeinschaft might still just about be salvaged. Richard Steele, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, Francis Hutcheson and Edmund Burke all made vital Irish contributions to this nouvelle vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and ...”

“... American, and like any good scout was both pathologically self-assured and incurably naive. David Foster Wallace said that he spoke like ‘Jimmy Stewart on acid’ (though Lynch’s addictions were the diner-appropriate kind: coffee, sugar, cigarettes). Whatever the contradiction – mainstream avant-gardist, reactionary visionary, pervert in a top-buttoned ...”

“... not be reduced to this. ‘Our Association’, he insisted, must ‘take no step calculated to foster delusions of this kind’. And for another seventy-five years, neither it nor Cambridge did.1 But sociology has now arrived. And theoretically, it has softened. The sociologists no longer propose social laws. They almost all agree that there are no ...”

“... architects to think there was anything for them in new Tube stations besides the ‘fit-out’. As Richard MacCormac, whose firm has designed the new Southwark Station, put it: ‘the engineers design the system, then the architects dress it up. Was it just a matter of deciding which tiles to put on the platform walls?’ When Paoletti started looking for ...”

“... the tomb of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, beheaded in 1322, while Yorkists venerated their archbishop Richard Scrope, executed in 1405. Despite periodic repression, both cults persisted until the Reformation. Another class of dubious martyrs were children supposedly murdered by Jews, such as the hapless William of Norwich in 1144. William’s cult, obsessively ...”

“... be a biographical dictionary of an array of fictional characters from great movies: the likes of Richard Blaine and Ilsa Lund, George Bailey, Travis Bickle and Norman Bates, who turn out, in the interstices of the entries, to have entangled lives and a dark plot all of their own. If only Howard Hawks wasn’t dead and had made a movie of Suspects we could ...”

“... was a purportedly national insurrection that was significant only in the capital. It was, as Roy Foster provokingly but accurately described it, a putsch. A more genuinely national rebellion might have bequeathed a different legacy: a felt need to atone for inaction at Easter was one of the forces driving the subsequent guerrilla war. Having rejected the ...”

“... equivalent of the entire population of Mexico moving into the US in one year’. The foster parents​ of Isis and the other Sunni jihadi movements in Iraq and Syria are Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies and Turkey. This doesn’t mean the jihadis didn’t have strong indigenous roots, but their rise was crucially supported by outside Sunni ...”

“... structural and connected to America’s experience of war. Military success has helped to foster constitutional stasis and complacency. The UK exhibits comparable problems, but to a more pronounced degree. Like the US, but over a longer period of time, the UK has been both a markedly warlike state and generally a successful one. In the mid-17th ...”

“... seas; the Clashing Rocks crush rash explorers. Natural conservatism and the passion for authority foster an acceptance of tradition, however grotesque. Ultimately non-tenable theories, above all that of the geocentric universe, attract too great a weight of psychological and religious investment to be abandoned with impunity. But, as Galileo may or may not ...”

“... when he writes that ‘Dulles carried messages; he did not make policy.’ Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was a powerful formulator of policies. Eisenhower had a rather arm’s-length view of the separation of powers: Congress was not normally to be too much chivvied by the White House, nor was Congressional curiosity about his executive office to be ...”

“... the heir to the adiaphoristic conception of the Church of England which had been articulated by Richard Hooker: a conception which refused the claims of Geneva and Rome alike. Laud’s mistake was to annex a programme of churchmanship, which might have won acceptance, to political and economic ambitions which enabled the Puritans who resisted them to look ...”

“... Purity. Man Two is successful, manipulative, priapic, with an aridity to his heart: the rock star Richard Katz in Freedom, the ‘famous internet outlaw’ Andreas Wolf in Purity. What seemed in The Corrections like a generous sharing of perspective between characters who, being related, can’t avoid acknowledging that they see things differently – the ...”