“... of a colleague. (A jocosely Irish project, this: Terry Wogan, Eamonn Andrews, Frank Delaney and Henry Kelly are to be your actual bearers of the fictional body.) Then he accepts an invitation to speak at the annual dinner of the Alma Tadema Society, founded to boost the decaying fortunes of an aged RA, and used by some of its exotic backers as a cover for ...”

“... Yankee cognoscenti fled the parboiled American plains for the amenities of English civil life. Henry James dined out on transatlantic discrepancies until they nearly killed him and to this day there is still a kind of American for whom England is an America. But increasingly, these are the disoriented few. Something that never really was – money springs ...”

“... King James Bible) are uncertain too. But the three missing letters show the vertiginous power of error suddenly to invert meaning, and they illuminate, momentarily, the responsibility resting on the underpaid, undervalued, put-upon compositor. One can understand why, with so much at stake, his exhausted fingers might have hesitated over the rows of ...”

“... kind, and keeping the maximum number of plates spinning with flicks of punctuation. It would do Henry James’s vision more violence to translate his books into an English deprived of intermediate stops than to render them in a comma-rich Esperanto. The novels of Proust and Mann would lose much of their intellectual flavour if commas were rationed. Céline ...”

“... inertia prevailed. Now, with the politicians themselves running gagging down the corridors of power, the obstacles rapidly disappeared. The Thames Purification Bill was introduced on 15 July and swiftly passed into law on 2 August, the last day of the session. Thus 1858 was fated to be famous in British history principally for the Great Stink, as it was ...”

“... old stuff about the Labour Party being a coalition, about the inevitable moderating influence of power (a liberal view that the Manchester Guardian once took when Hitler became Chancellor) and about socialism as the rhetoric of the Labour Party. There was even a hasty attempt to redraw Michael Foot as a moderate, a nice old thing who had had a wild youth, a ...”

“... of What Might Have Been a Short Story, Almost Forgotten (octosyllabics)’. It is a work of some power, in a characteristic Warren mode: evocations of violent or menacing incident, fragments of narrative shot through with a peculiar poetic intensity. Warren said in an interview in 1970 that he couldn’t write poems during a phase of short-story ...”

“... down), his toxic masculinity and coarseness of word and deed. Blake Gopnik observes that ‘the power he sought, in all things, at all times, had to be a cover for a psyche that always felt powerless.’ For years he had sought the backing of a university as collaborator and eventually inheritor of his collection. Many were approached without their finding ...”

“... Moscow, Peking and Buckingham Palace. And they would finally catch me in the act.’ ‘No, when power is exaggerated … it ends up being reduced to nothing: to use it is too risky.’ He decides he is not going to tell his editor anything about it. Buzzati was born in northern Italy in 1906. He was a painter and poet as well as a journalist and fiction ...”

“... have an idea worth pursuing. In all of her novels so far, a couple begins with differences of power to overcome. In Conversations with Friends, Nick is older and richer than Frances (not to mention married); in Normal People, Connell is more popular and more sexually experienced than Marianne (before things reverse at university); in Beautiful ...”

“... but there is less of it in The Executioner’s Song than there is in Marilyn, and the greater power of the more recent book hints that there may not be much more for him to do with it. He has also been drawn, over the years, to a myth of violence, which produced the fraudulence of An American Dream: The Executioner’s Song is not fraudulent, and the ...”

“... authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone the same year that Henry James published Roderick Hudson; Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems coincided with Coca-Cola’s adoption of its ‘distinctly shaped bottle’). Still, naturalists have their molluscs, entomologists their butterflies: why shouldn’t literary critics indulge ...”

“... are still invisible, although out in the open. What they have lost is their prestige, their power as secrets. The thought corresponds to DeLillo’s haunting phrase about a particular day of excitements: ‘It was all falling indelibly into the past.’ We can’t erase it, but it will never again be anything but the past. History is no longer the ...”

“... wit seems to have been as much a part of the ethos of the short-lived republic as sublimity: Henry Marten could subvert protest at radical measures in the Commons by laughter, and friends like Thomas Chaloner and Thomas May shared his sceptical wit. To denounce them as libertines was to become a stock tactic for conservatives anxious to show where ...”

“... of the British Museum, would have raised a storm. But this was France, where those who have power over you also have immunity. The young Mitterrand’s loyalty to the Marshal is not to be gainsaid. It’s true that it changed direction, however, once the Allies had finally got the upper hand over the Nazis. A policy of wait-and-see was then no longer ...”