“... gleaming, double-edged thing: both a brisk appreciation of Cather’s artistic achievement and a stern, even cutting assault on modern Cather scholarship. It grows out of a controversial article that Acocella, a well-known dance critic, published in the New Yorker in 1995. The original article was a fairly devastating attack on the various ways in which ...”

“... years the ability to sort and retrieve immense amounts of data. He’d seen the way Putnam – stern, captious, venerated, feared, a ‘tyrant and megalomaniac’, a demander of ‘unflinching loyalty’ – nurtured a ‘powerful institutional identification among the library’s employees, insisting that clerks and librarians subordinate their desires to ...”

“... at least until Peaky Blinders came along? In my experience, nobody, not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he ...”

“... around the place keeping the planet from exploding. I remember a lecture about Vico, a lecture by Richard Gregory on the physiology of perception, for all the world as if a Pelican book had come to life, and a rather baffled aged British traveller to Eastern Parts, who talked with all the ease of his upbringing of ‘fuzzy wuzzies’ while I squeezed ...”

“... whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in surprisingly sympathetic ways, joined in the chorus of condemnation of the ‘medical brutality’ which ...”

“... of the modernist canon. Protective of its cub, Partisan Review runs a judicious appreciation by Richard Poirier (one of Mailer’s early academic champions), but no chorus rises to proclaim Podhoretz the bold young successor to Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Stanley Edgar Hyman and Mary McCarthy in the Quality Lit Crit Biz. He is needled as a ...”

“... meantime lots of other terrorists (freedom fighters, if you like) have managed the same thing: the Stern Gang in Israel, the FLN in Algeria, Flosy in Yemen, Zanla in Zimbabwe and so on. In all these cases, the metropolitan power ultimately decided that the game wasn’t worth the candle and retired back home. The supine nature of British foreign policy derives ...”

“... did not intend the city’s siege but had ‘bumbled into it’. Commenting on this volte-face, Richard Poirier wrote in Raritan Review that ‘the feelings aroused in Chancellor (and in millions of viewers presumably) by the television footage simply had no place to go outside the programme.’ Far from just changing his mind from one week to the ...”

“... Fyers for persistently importuning in the tube station at South Kensington, but his sympathy was stern: ‘Whatever penalty I inflict will be as nothing compared with the punishment he has brought upon himself by his own action.’The attention paid to cases involving toffs, most notably Lord Montagu’s trial and imprisonment in 1954, creates a tabloid ...”

“... them instead. Its title, ‘The Angry Act: The Role of Aggression in Creativity’, sounds stern, but the case histories it describes are those of Kandinsky, Thomas Mann and Giacometti. If those are the angry actors, where’s the harm in joining their gang? As the article explains, ‘whether attempts at channelling aggression are successful or not ...”

“... which his friend Francis Sheehy Skeffington, a pacifist, was shot by the British, ‘with pity’, Richard Ellmann writes in his biography. ‘Although he evaluated the Rising as useless, he felt also out of things … He predicted that some day he and Giorgio would go back to wear the shamrock in an independent Ireland.’ His book Dubliners had appeared in ...”

“... more than 16 hours to be admitted. An A&E consultant at the Royal Stoke University Hospital, Dr Richard Fawcett, broadcast his frustration on Twitter. ‘It breaks my heart,’ he wrote, ‘to see so many frail and elderly patients in the corridor for hours and hours … I personally apologise to the people of Stoke for the Third World conditions of the ...”