“... These​ two books will be read, inevitably, as studies of neoliberalism, a world order – and a word – that has snuck up on us in the last few decades. I say ‘snuck up’ for a reason. I remember the 1980s, when our antagonists were identifiable and embodied: the one with the handbag, the one with the cowboy hat, and then their grey successors ...”

“... us nothing about the world but did so in a way that was entirely political.For anyone who wants to read Richter’s work this way, Table (1962) is a better place to start than Living with Pop. The source image is from an Italian design magazine, but Richter has erased the central area with a series of muddy gestures that defeat any attempt to commodify the ...”

“... kind of clothing that will make you look poverty stricken.’ She wrote about meeting the actor Richard Pryor, who in the course of their interviewbought a gold necklace … for the woman he had introduced as his girlfriend … a gold ring for his manager and a gold ring for his valet … wrote a cheque for sixteen hundred dollars to his jeweller ...”

“... In April​ 2022, Justin Trudeau watched Richard Baker, the 39th governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, hand over ownership of its ornate department store in Winnipeg to the local First Nations. The ceremonial was Hanoverian, with Baker and Grand Chief Jerry Daniels trading pelts and a gold coin, but the rhetoric was that of postcolonial reconciliation ...”

“... England, progresses through satirists such as Walter Map (under Henry II) and Chaucer (under Richard II), through the attempts to reanimate classical verse satire in the late Elizabethan period, on (at length) through the 18th century, right up to Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It. Sperrin sees satire as being ‘primarily concerned with regime-level ...”

“... he shouted, ‘here is a great book that tells the Truth about Ulster. Go home, friend, and read it.’ The book was The Narrow Ground by A.T.Q. Stewart: did the book inspire Paisley, or did the voice of Old Ravenhill inspire The Narrow Ground? Accompanying this question is the problem of the relation of middle-class Unionism to working-class ...”

“... where Styron had been briefly employed – ‘I asked Diarmuid Russell to let me be the first to read Guy Davenport’s novel,’ he writes to Blackburn. ‘I stayed up for seven hours last night reading it, and I think it’s an overwhelming, sorrowful, beautiful job of writing, and I frankly went to bed at 5.00 in the morning disturbed, shaken and humble ...”

“... her to the attention of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds ...”

“... good at it too (his letter to his daughter about how to write an essay is the best thing I’ve read on that ticklish subject). Having said that, he is also aware of his tendency to gravitate towards the glib or the showy (‘War is war and sometimes I think peace is too. Damn, there goes an epigram’), and often takes care to guard against it (‘didn’t ...”

“... these notes without knowing me,’ Jacques Derrida wrote in his diary in 1976, ‘without having read and understood everything of what I’ve written elsewhere, would remain blind and deaf to them, while he would finally feel that he was understanding easily.’ If you think you can understand me by reading my diaries, he might have been warning future ...”

“... of chance can be rigged – but this is not what we are conscious of in reading about Ursula. We read that she intended, in Hamlet’s words, to ‘leave betimes’, and that she did what she intended. That there was a pattern for her in Lermontov’s novel is conceivable: but it can’t be claimed that it fits her with exactitude, or that it provides an ...”

“... Essays on Freud, once wrote to a friend: ‘I, too, was greatly impressed when I first read Freud. He’s extraordinary – of course he is full of fishy thinking and his charm and the charm of the subject is so great that you may easily be fooled ... so hang on to your brains.’ This is not a piece of advice that all the contributors to this ...”

“... on the House of Commons in the 1640s, on which Hexter’s best work was written, though Elizabeth Read Foster analyses ‘The Journal of the House of Lords for the Long Parliament’. There is nothing on Sir Thomas More. Few of the contributors are former pupils. The five most distinguished are neither pupils nor colleagues nor even Americans. A specially ...”

“... Great Books, that Pale within which critics have comfortably nestled, is that you have to begin to read the obscure books and authors on whose behalf you have been campaigning. (Many of the weariest readers in scholarly libraries at present are feminist historical critics, busily finding the women’s writing to make an entire alternative canon.) Even within ...”

“... growing attachment to Shelley. A typical example, the entry for 9 October 1814, originally read: ‘Mary goes to bed at eight – sit up with Shelley over the fire – get rather in a horrid mood – go to bed at eleven cannot sleep all night.’ With erasures and additions this becomes: ‘We go to bed at eight – get in rather a horrid mood ...”