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“... came four days before Christmas 1970, when Elvis Presley (who’d written the president a six-page letter requesting a meeting and suggesting he be made a ‘federal agent-at-large’ in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs) was ushered into the Oval Office. Presenting himself as an ardent patriot and fellow Patton fan, Elvis denounced the Beatles ...”

“... silence, a silence which I find intolerable, but a footnote for which we don’t have time, page 70 in the standard edition of Notes To, which kind of waffles about Jews and Christians perhaps having lived too close to each other so that the borderline got kind of messy and problematic. 1948 and there, I must say, I don’t know what to think.’ Ricks ...”

“... degree. To be able to sight-read and memorise anything, to translate one’s reading of notes on a page into an immediate sound on the instrument, using one’s fingers in mostly unnatural ways, to have the confidence (this is of capital importance) to know that one can do this at any time: these were all capacities that Gould possessed in the highest ...”

“... force of that passage. She spoke about her ex-friends as if they were research that went wrong. Norman Mailer had been ‘nice’ in the early days but he got above himself and had too many big ideas. To her, he was just a boy rolling at her feet, and she disliked the idea that journalism could be about analysis and penetration, as well as the work of eyes ...”

“... image I fancy). But Judt did none of these things. This is a work which, on almost every page, evokes to readers over the age of 40 what they once felt, hoped for, took part in or fled from. Judt has written, in great detail and at great length, the biography of a middle-aged continent trying, after a disgraceful past, to settle down and go ...”

“... Karl was introduced to the mighty poets of Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch, among others. MacIver played some of the part of a father, taking Karl all over town to whatever was happening on stage or on screen. MacCaig was to become a lifelong friend, guide and admirer; they shared the same dryness of ...”

“... through the ordinary of Flaubert’s “Un Coeur Simple” ... would spend months revising a ten-page story so that it might come out like the poem Yeats dreamed of, “as cold and beautiful as the dawn”. These values of “art” persisted, and in the five years after I left Ann Arbor, I wrote exactly seven stories. In terms of experience, they were ...”

“... He asks me what I’m reading. It’s actually re-rereading and telling him he would hate every page I show him James Lees-Milne’s Through Wood and Dale. I ask him what he is reading and he shows me The Origins of the Final Solution. Both are unsuitable books and, as I say to him, we would each of us derive more benefit if I were reading his book and he ...”

“... gift, as Ackroyd says, but Martha displays it every time she makes an appearance on the page, as if she were a doll with only one movement. And most of the characters parade their salient habits in the same way. The method does also pay off, though, since one of the surprising triumphs of the book is a pair of parody rustics who seem to have stepped ...”

“... the merchant fleet become more competitive.’ Sproat was followed by much more senior ministers, Norman Tebbit among them, who advised British shipowners to ‘flag out’ their ships under ‘flags of convenience’ in the outposts of the old Empire – Gibraltar. Bermuda, Hong Kong – precisely in order to avoid the ...”

“... children of the family he loses a foot in a traffic accident. The dying clergyman had on the first page complained of a pain in his foot: evidently a small bitter wheel has come full circle. The novel’s main feeling is dejected, though the dimness is qualified by small surprises of kindness and love, some small and precariously flickering lamps. There is ...”

“... for ‘trivialising frameworks of analysis’ should be warned that Smith gives the game away on page 6, which makes the innumerable narrations of mysterious killings less enthralling than they might have been. The borders of the ancient province of the Gévaudan (the name comes from the Celtic Gabali tribe) are those, more or less, of modern Lozère, the ...”

“... character.’ Not long after their wedding, the young couple crossed paths in Paris with Norman Mailer, a classmate of Goodman’s at Harvard. Writing about the encounter two decades later, Mailer remembered Goodman as a ‘tall powerful handsome dark-haired young man with a profound air of defeated gloom’. Levertov was ‘a charming and most ...”

“... fans are yet as free of the assumptive world as Goffman. We haven’t caught up with him yet.’ Norman Denzin, on the other hand, believes he offered a sociology ‘that seemed to turn human beings into Kafkaesque insects to be studied under glass’. He did not address ‘social injustice, violence or war under capitalism’. Goffman’s actors were men ...”

“... Withers, who had started at Vogue as a subeditor in 1931, replaced Penrose. Her chief photographer Norman Parkinson described her as an intellectual who knew very little about fashion and thought it ‘slight and ephemeral’. Withers, like Todd, was more interested in writers and artists than clothes: Dylan Thomas, Kingsley Amis, Bertrand Russell and Simone ...”