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“... all these sentences could have been written by the same person, the person who wrote ‘Frank drops me off outside the sisters’ flat,’ ‘You could hear the kids yelling in the pool,’ ‘I could hear kids on the waste ground behind me,’ ‘The travel-agent smoked in the empty church’ – first sentences, by different writers, from an ...”

“... This is the third of Michel Houellebecq’s novels, and in it, as in the previous two, his hero yearns, mostly in vain, for men and women who are strangers to each other to reach out spontaneously and touch each other: for men to be able to dispense with verbal courtship, for women to put aside cultural restraint, discrimination and any desire to be seduced; and for the sexes to spend as much time as they can cope with in mutually rewarding fornication ...”

“... presented himself at the offices of the Atlantic, where he met the man who had accepted his poems, James Russell Lowell. Lowell questioned Howells closely to ensure that the poems were really his, then welcomed him warmly. He gave Howells a letter of introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who passed him on to Emerson and Thoreau with a note that announced: ‘I ...”

“... as much as I thought I deserved. I guess it was too much.’ She introduced Salvador Dalí and Frank Zappa: ‘Dalí took one look at Frank from across the room and rose to his feet in immediate approbation.’ In New York, she wrote, ‘there are no spaces between the words, it’s one of the charms of the ...”

“... minor writer with a major style’. Gore Vidal thinks that Updike ‘describes to no purpose’. James Wood complains that Updike fills his characters’ thoughts with showy phrases that don’t suit them or their situations; and that the ‘very pretty ribbons’ of Updike’s style are a kind of kitsch, which expresses a complacent confidence in the ...”

“... Aristotle’s phronesis led the poet back towards a native American pragmatism, recalling William James at Harvard but also providing critical anticipations of Richard Rorty. The truth is no doubt messier than these formulations suggest – say, that Eliot after a time was content to assimilate rather than extend his philosophical learning, but that the ...”

“... some sensitivity to the tricky business of naming. ‘What if we hadn’t had such great names?’ Frank O’Hara wonders in Nat Tate, the hoax biography that took in much of New York’s art establishment a few weeks ago: ‘what if we had been called Gilbert Kline, Jonathan Pollock, Cyril O’Hara, Jennifer Krasner, Timothy Rivers, Philip Tate?’ The ...”

“... he studied under Delmore Schwartz. More important, he became friends with John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, like-minded fellow students. On graduation Koch moved to New York, where he lived downstairs from the painter Jane Freilicher, became acquainted with the New York art scene, and liked to stare out of the window at passing trains while wearing a ...”

“... I am sure, that so many people fail to recognise his greatness, and value him less than, say, James, Conrad, Lawrence or Virginia Woolf, is because they miss his depths, they cannot fathom them unless they present in a frontal, full-dress form.’ It is a matter for regret or possibly indignation that this sentence, absurd in almost every possible ...”

“... the famous claim that he was only saying: ‘This is so, is it not?’). ‘That is what Henry James says about the novels of Arnold Bennett, and I think you will agree. It is final,’ he told the man who painted his portrait. Yet later, it seems, he somewhat revised this judgment. Over the famous change of mind about Dickens, MacKillop is cautious, not ...”

“... found the core of his talent. It all started with a spirited exchange in print with Henry James. In September 1884, when Stevenson was new to that oasis of convalescents, he picked up a copy of Longman’s Magazine, which carried James’s essay ‘The Art of Fiction’. He knew ...”

“... of the United States of America’ – does he repeat himself? Very well, he repeats himself.As Frank Kermode once said, literary canons ‘negate the distinction between knowledge and opinion’. They make beliefs about what we should know into what we do actually know. That is why they are both necessary and dangerous. They are necessary because you ...”

“... of ‘casualties’ and ‘victims’. She describes obesity researchers as ‘heroes’. That Frank Shuttlesmith from Des Moines, 48 years old and with generations of comfortable forebears stretching out behind him, is a noble victim of a fearful global epidemic because he’s thick around the middle, doesn’t care to walk and enjoys extra cheese on his ...”

“... visions any less real. The Mars Society very nearly fell apart at its first convention over the frank opinions of Robert Zubrin, a scientist who in 1990 had come up with an ingenious engineering solution to the problems of getting people to Mars. The plan, which he called ‘Mars Direct’, was to deploy recycled space shuttle rockets to deliver equipment ...”

“... assassination. A more plausible cinematic influence on him is Suddenly (1954), in which Frank Sinatra plays a President’s assassin who acquired his taste for killing in the Second World War. Yet the idea was there in The Manchurian Candidate: an emotionally unstable man returns from a mysterious stay in a Communist country to shoot the ...”