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“... even bother with the sub-Freudian niceties of an Abse, preferring to sink straight to Paul Johnson’s level and to say that there is an axiomatic, Forsterian connection between homosexual and traitorous deportment. To clear Tom on this charge, then, is a matter of journalistic and political hygiene. But it still leaves the matter of misogyny and ...”

“... self-server and mass-murderer Robert McNamara. He recalled an occasion, quite early in the Lyndon Johnson presidency, when Jackie had come up to him at a reception in New York and beaten her fists on his chest, calling on him to stop the killing in Vietnam. Of course, one could object and say that she never took her prestige and committed it publicly against ...”

“... misadventures and backchat. Boon had to field objections not only from the tyrannous ‘Biddy’ Johnson of Woman’s Weekly and the stern male law-givers of Dundee, but from Mrs Mary Bonnycastle, of Harlequin Books in Winnipeg, to whom he supplied doctor-nurse novels in an endless stream and who was determined to keep Canada clean. When an author complained ...”

“... as some did even then, no doubt implied a special relationship. It was Pamela Hansford Johnson who put her foot down, when they were married in 1950, and who decided that he was to be called Charles; in relation to any earlier period the name is an innocent anachronism, which has the advantage of facilitating quotation from Philip. Charles (to ...”

“... the measured acceptance of the actual that became almost the signature of his own later poetry; a frank acknowledgment of the scattered incompleteness of experience constituted, for him, an important test of a writer’s humility before the sheer solidity of the empirical.This anthologising impulse made for a distinctive reviewing style. He could, when he ...”

“... up. The Quarry also shares a number of similarities with The Wasp Factory: like the psychopathic Frank in The Wasp Factory, The Quarry’s narrator, Kit, is a troubled teen stuck in a house with strange and unpredictable adults. What, the novel seems to be asking, is normal adult behaviour? What is innocence? What is youth? How shall we then live? In both ...”

“... and having much in common with the easy, unshowy critical penetration of Watt’s contemporary Frank Kermode. But, as his intellectual trajectory suggests, considerable scholarly resources stood surety for this agreeable surface manner. As Watt reflected, his aim had been ‘to transcend what I had learned from the idealist modes of German thought by ...”

“... silence and acquiescence, is virtually endless. It goes all the way up to Earl Warren and Lyndon Johnson. It continues to the present day in the unbroken wall of secrecy that is permitted to stand around the covert activities of the CIA, and in the continued co-operation of major organs of US journalism in trying to put the assassination behind us. What ...”

“... a secret network employing a Jordanian-born businessman, Fred Haobsh, and a CIA front corporation, Johnson Consultants. Another favourite conduit was Singapore, which received nine million anti-personnel mines, rather more than the three million people in peaceful Singapore could have needed. Iraq demanded credits and money to buy all these goods, and the ...”

“... superficially at least – far more harmonious. From Our ’Enry through Gary Mason and Big Frank Bruno (but not Joe Bugner, who was Hungarian, refused to play the game and was disliked by all on both counts) the cult of the deferential, smiling bruiser still holds sway. We expect our fighters to behave like Sergeant Paine in The Third Man who punches ...”

“... art galleries apart, was there a natural home for them? In 1958, when Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson’s Seagram Building went up, it seemed that there was. The Abstract Expressionists, who, in the Forties, could see themselves as an embattled avant-garde, were out of their cold-water lofts, and taking on the status of giants and heroes. Pollock was ...”

“... said in the larger works of which it is an epigone, it at least has the advantage that Samuel Johnson commended in handbooks, of allowing you to go to the fireside and read in comfort. Given this convenience, a pursuit of etymologies is a pleasurable, skipping business, with much to reveal waywardly, not only about the quarry, the word, but also about the ...”

“... criticism. Kraus’s first ambition had been to be an actor. His contemporary, the playwright Frank Wedekind, thought Kraus had missed his vocation by not working in the theatre. He would describe himself instead as ‘perhaps the first case of a writer who simultaneously experiences the process of writing as an actor’. Just as the mask was one of the ...”

“... all restrictions relating to sex, so making possible the current explosion of pornography and frank talk in the media and the home. Second, it significantly reduced the role of the marriage-bonded family. It made sexual cohabitation socially and morally acceptable as a stage prior, or as an alternative, to formal marriage; and it caused a change in both ...”

“... also had two children). Di Prima wrote plays, acted, directed and produced. They put on dramas by Frank O’Hara and Robert Duncan at various downtown venues and broadcast Antonin Artaud’s radio piece ‘To Have Done with the Judgment of God’, complete with ‘gongs and blood-curdling screams’, to the whole of Bleecker Street. In 1965 di Prima founded ...”