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“... War. I concentrate for the moment on The Pisan Cantos because that seems to me, as it does to Anthony Woodward, Pound’s ‘greatest achievement’. Everything that had begun to go wrong with The Cantos – their obsessive, one-dimensional quality in that forced march the reader takes through Cantos 52 to 71 – is righted at Pisa; and if literature ...”

“... Who is Bob Woodward? If his books had no jackets, if the prefaces and acknowledgments were ripped away; if you’d never watched American television or read the US papers; if all you had were the texts and you read them from cover to cover, would you know who Bob Woodward is? No, you wouldn’t, but if you read the jackets, acknowledgments and prefaces and followed the TV news, you still wouldn’t know that much about him ...”

“... about academic life: ‘Why are the disputes so poisonous? Because the stakes are so low.’ Bob Woodward’s new book about the first year of the Trump administration raises some of these thorny issues, but it turns them on their head. No one could doubt that having Trump in the White House is an existential matter: the president’s decisions have the ...”

“... clerks as sons and daughters – and is in every case supposed to be based on confidentiality. Woodward (the famous hero of Watergate journalism) and Armstrong, his colleague at the Washington Post, apparently succeeded in shattering that confidentiality, for most of their ‘inside stories’ (if true) come from among the 170 former clerks they say they ...”

“... question of Diego Garcia, raised, in this group of books, by the Latin American Bureau and by Anthony Barnett. If the kelpers were too few and boring to be rescued, what was wrong with throwing the population of Diego Garcia out of their homes to make way for an American air base? The Diego Garcians too were a distant handful, and would have been equally ...”

“... while MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell gave her public instructions on how to use a microphone, Bob Woodward bitched that she was ‘screaming’ and Bob Cusack, the editor of the political newspaper the Hill, said: ‘When Hillary Clinton raises her voice, she loses.’ One could get the impression that a woman should campaign in a sultry whisper, but of ...”

“... his traitorous and obsessive first persons, even when they are based on real-life originals (his Anthony Blunt is a sort of HH). Indeed his reply to an interviewer who asked him about the vanishing girl in his Book of Evidence trilogy – that Freddie, his murderous narrator, ‘has destroyed her ... virtually by the fact that he hasn’t imagined her ...”

“... to slam ‘platitudes about the disappointment of sequels’ in defence of the Palliser novels of Anthony Trollope. A fourth, citing the same passage, asks ‘disappointing for whom?’, while proceeding to explain that the ‘general reading public’ has been eager to ‘gobble up’ sequels and spin-offs to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. The ...”