“... is set in Florence, in the year 1855, and the narration takes the form of letters written by a young American, Robert Booth, to his friend Professor Prescott, an authority on Theoretical and Practical Ethics. Booth, in retreat from rejection in love and a sense of his own failure in literature, has known at least one stroke of luck: he has become, he tells ...”

“... Facebook may have started as a way to rank one woman’s hotness over another’s, but it has been quick to produce its first feminists. Everything goes faster in Silicon Valley: code is written overnight; engineers get around the office on aerodynamic skateboards called RipStiks; a company less than ten years old is worth $104 billion for a day before losing $35 billion in value ...”

“... She would accuse him of being infected with venereal disease, of having procured an abortion for a young girl, and of keeping a woman in New York.’ Mellon, now in his mid-fifties, was left with two choices, neither particularly desirable. He could accede to Nora’s demands and share the children with her – and her lover – or he could do battle in the ...”

“... disrobed on the set, at the studios of Twentieth-Century Fox. Just as she did so, there appeared a young man with a camera. On assignment for Life (expecting to take some pretty pictures of the actress in performance) his eyes nearly popped out of his head. Marilyn, he was alert enough to know, had not been photographed naked since the late Forties, when she ...”

“... allurement. There is a touching early short story, ‘Notes on a Departure’ (1929), about a young intellectual, a Jew and a New Yorker, on his first teaching job at some up-country university. He feels a charm in the place, something accepting, unrancorous, easy-going: but he knows it is not for him. ‘Upon [his students] was set the sweet sign of ...”

“... room; so strong had been the reaction to postwar ‘normalcy’ (including the corruptions of Warren Harding and Teapot Dome) that all authority seemed, in Walker Evans’s words, ‘almost insulting to a sensitive citizen’. Even in the Thirties, politics were peripheral: ‘with the exception of Edmund Wilson, almost none of my parents’ friends had ...”

“... Easter Sunday fell on April Fools’ Day in 1934. A young woman called Bonnie Parker was sitting in a field by a narrow dirt road near the town of Grapevine, Texas, playing with a white rabbit that she had named Sonny Boy. She was waiting for her mother, to whom she intended to give the rabbit as an Easter present, but the rendezvous got delayed ...”

“... but they made each other laugh. Both joined the Hypocrites club (‘a noisy, alcohol-soaked rat-warren’) where Cockburn fell in love with whisky (‘I got up fairly early … I would then drink a large sherry glass of neat whisky before breakfast and … drink heavily throughout the day’). Astonishingly, his drinking and his later consumption of several ...”

“... in the orbit of William F. Buckley’s National Review and the zealous campus activists of Young Americans for Freedom (a group ultimately larger and far more influential than the much celebrated leftist Students for a Democratic Society), as well as members of the staunchly anti-Communist John Birch Society (named for an American missionary said to ...”

“... pure gold.’ Nevertheless, he orders his sidekicks to shoot her son Bailey, his wife, their two young children and their newborn baby. As gunfire sounds in the woods, the Grandmother cries: ‘You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the ...”

“... elegant, his head held back a bit as he talked, as though you were a menu.’ From Light Years, a young girl smitten by love: ‘She could not eat, like a dog that has been sold.’ And there is another kind, the imagery of states of being. In The Hunters, he writes of disappointment: ‘There had been many ambitions … They were scattered behind him like ...”

“... about an inability to write a poem or a story: but it also seems to me that the conjunction of the young Donoghue with the savant is among the attractions of the book. The alternation between what is going on now and what he now thinks was going on then might suggest some degree of attachment to a principle of randomness: at the same time, the two kinds of ...”

“... of the established Church and Government’. Most intransigent of all, perhaps, was the choleric young English Tory Ambrose Serle, who spent two years in Revolutionary America as secretary to Lord Howe in 1776-8. He was appalled beyond measure at what he found there. ‘Religion is an Honor to man, if it be true Religion and truly used,’ he wrote in his ...”

“... quality in her so as to catch it on film. But Gardner, who had been obviously shy when she was young, was still secretly shy when older, and even oddly shy before the camera. As a result, although she always looked pretty, at first she was a wooden performer. She became an actor when she found a way of presenting herself on screen, the self she presented ...”

“... those follies’). He was right to make a distinction between the best Play Unpleasant, Mrs Warren’s Profession (in which the heroine defies both dramatic convention and dramatic expectation by refusing both marriage and reconciliation with her brothel-keeping mother) and Plays Pleasant like Arms and the Man and Candida, in which the formal ...”