“... with the beautiful faces were also, mysteriously, the ones it was most fun to be with.’ The self-proclaimed ‘honesty’ of the wild, well-born stranger was doubted, but her fascination prevailed. She married an art dealer, Kenelm, understood to be seriously ill, and conducted daring affairs, one of them on the Métro with her friend Monique’s friend ...”

“... Picasso had, after 1950, become Adolf Wölfli, or John Ford had ended up as John Cassavetes. Or if Robert Crumb had turned into his obsessive mad-genius brother, Charles Crumb. If thisweredrawn byKirby inthe 1970sit wouldbe a massivegleaminghystericallyhyperarticulatedpsychedelicedifice ...”

“... sorts of American writers: the young Allen Ginsberg paid him homage and copied his style, while Robert Lowell, for example, looked to Williams for a freer, more democratic manner than his rivals could offer. Though he remains an acquired taste in Britain, Williams’s position in American poetry, at least, seems assured. That position rests, above all ...”

“... with sudden ecstasy that this was true being, where words and consciousness and the solitary self melted into one. ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,’ wrote Wordsworth of his sister Dorothy. Virginia Woolf gave more than that: she gave, or seemed to give, the pure Private Life, quite separate from the contingent miseries, anxieties and rivalries of ...”

“... Königsberg, the young people of Jena were convinced that a post-Kantian future of autonomous self-creation belonged to them. Before long August and Caroline Schlegel also settled in Jena, followed by Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel. Then Hölderlin arrived, and in 1798 his brilliant young friend Schelling – a 23-year-old professor with an irresistible ...”

“... Extravagance and self-indulgence were among the kinder accusations levelled at Orson Welles by industry chiefs. For the most part the charges were unjust. Not only was Welles possibly the most distinguished film artist to be abused and all but broken by the system, and by leading individuals within it (including politicians, newspaper magnates, journalists, gossip-columnists and even critics), he was possibly the least culpable ...”

“... his estimate about Cuban response to an invasion.Allowing for Schlesinger’s retrospective, self-serving grace-notes (one has to love the placing of the word ‘wryly’), a conversation something like this one must have taken place in March 1961, just a few weeks after the bombastic, menacing ‘Ask not …’ inaugural address, and very shortly before ...”

“... one hadn’t seen it before is to look at the world with new eyes, and that is an expansion of the self. It may or may not be an improvement, but not every improvement is the correction of an error. And not every improvement need bring us closer to the truth. Scarry discusses error only in connection with an individual’s change of mind. She doesn’t address ...”

“... The New Negro: ‘In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is – or promises to be – a race capital ... Without pretence to their political significance, Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia.’What Locke ...”

“... Josef Frolik, a Czechoslovak defector, who said Owen was on a £500 monthly retainer organised by Robert Husak, another intelligence officer at the Czechoslovak embassy in London. Owen, Frolik said, had been passing secrets to the Czechoslovaks since 1954. During his trial at the Old Bailey, Owen acknowledged receiving money but denied that he had given away ...”

“... forces of the recently deposed James II surrounded the largely Protestant city. Its governor, Robert Lundy, wanted to negotiate surrender as they didn’t have the resources to withstand a prolonged siege. But thirteen apprentice boys defied him and closed the gates. Lundy was banished, replaced by a stauncher man. The siege lasted 105 days. Derry’s ...”

“... SF fandom: for example, IMHO, meaning ‘in my humble opinion’, and ha ha only serious, which is self-explanatory. True hacker jargon must not be confused with the technobabble employed by suits to impress naive real users. It tends to have the surreal nature: ‘the Moof or dogcow is a semilegendary creature that lurks in the depths of the Macintosh ...”

“... to see, unless it is that unlike most novelists she made her books out of a busy, open, outgoing self: not a brooded, secretive, internal one. The fact remains that I would rather read about them and about their background, in such an excellent biography as this one is, than re-enter today the world of her own novels. Jenny Uglow is an erudite ...”

“... many other big bananas, Tinguely threw a switch and set the heap on course to clanging, twanging self-destruction. All three networks solemnly recorded the event, which for many people inaugurated the period of ‘non-judgmental’ art criticism. Marcel Duchamp, Warhol’s original Pop guru, commented approvingly that there was merit in the movement to ...”

“... had warned the Germans after 1871, a great victory is a great danger. It suspends the faculty of self-criticism. It tempts the beneficiary to ignore the re-appraisals that the less fortunate have embarked on. For most Britons the war taught two lessons: that a nation secure in its identity and cohesion, confident in its history and its mission, can triumph ...”