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“... Darwinism’ is killing off the malls. ‘The traffic hassles are awful,’ notes Jonathan Miller, the main author of a 1999 report on real-estate trends, ‘and people just generally don’t have the time to spend wandering around in malls like they used to.’ Even teenagers are moving on. ‘Malls used to be our social centres, but they’re not ...”

“... route to world fame. And the banality of Limonov’s ‘scandalous’ books, suggestive of Henry Miller’s, if Miller were viciously bloody-minded and thought Stalin was the greatest thing since apricot vodka. Brodsky put it well: It’s Me, Eddie ‘could have been written not by Dostoevsky or even Raskolnikov, but ...”

“... Walker Evans, James M. Cain, Nunnally Johnson, S.J. Perelman, Dawn Powell, Joseph Mitchell and John O’Hara. Many of these celebrated figures, artists and authors approaching fifty at the start of the decade or only lately past it, grew up in small provincial towns, emigrated to New York in the Jazz Age and worked together in the city rooms of the Herald ...”

“... to these standing stones and circular cairns that punctuate the fields. In the manner of Hugh Miller, stonemason and essayist, the grain of Ascherson’s thinking is apt to spark off these heathen formations, these ‘ritual spires of condensed fear and memory’, as he calls them, and a melancholic attitude accompanies the notion that the modern age can ...”

“... and passionate studies of economy, politics and culture by social historians as intelligent as John McEwen, John Foster and Ian Carter, writers as good as John McGrath and Tom Nairn, politicians as energetic as Robin Cook and Jim Sillars. To write for it felt like good militant fun (I ...”

“... sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolised by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. The absolute distinction made here between a writer and the ...”

“... is why Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are read all over the world while Pushkin, despite the efforts of John Fennell, Antony Wood. DM. Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, remains primarily a writer for readers of Russian. The myriad imperfections of rendering in any translation of a novel do not seriously impede what looks like genuine literary enjoyment: we weep for Anna ...”

“... Poetics he regards as ‘woolly rhapsodising’. He quotes in silence a passage from J. Hillis Miller as if it spoke nonsense for itself. But Gribble doesn’t make the necessary distinctions. He lumps Structuralism and Deconstruction together, forgetting that the most severe attack on Structuralism has come from Derrida’s chapter on Lévi-Strauss in De ...”

“... volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume added the name of Thom Gunn. Insofar as there has ever been agreement on the matter, the Movement has been taken to consist of ...”

“... Waldron calls a ‘laundry list of principles’. Fuller’s list is the most famous. Joseph Raz, John Finnis and Tom Bingham follow Fuller in proposing eight principles. Others have been more parsimonious: A.V. Dicey had three principles; John Rawls had four. Waldron pokes fun at this approach – ‘Robert Summers holds ...”

“... matters. Even when fame finally comes knocking on his door in the shape of Bernardo Bertolucci, John Malkovitch, Debra Winger, and a whole Hollywood camera crew, he remains resolutely sceptical – in the event, more or less correctly ...”

“... evidence of T.S. Eliot’s ‘homosexuality’ in T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land, James Miller could come up with very little. In Kipling’s case, Seymour-Smith can offer a little more but not much. It amounts to this: an 1886 lettter from Kipling (21 and still a journalist in India) to Crofts, one of his old masters at Westward Ho!; a scatter of ...”

“... though, by the wit, honesty and variety with which Enright defines his compromised position. John Bayley makes an interesting comparison in his essay between Larkin’s paradoxical need to fuse in his poetry a recognisable speaking voice with an almost Yeatsian authority and intensity of statement, and Enright’s more leisurely, less aggressive ...”

“... party without quickly being disgusted by its humbug or convulsed by its absurdity. Jonathan Miller was surely wrong when he said to Thompson: ‘The idea that Peter had an anarchic, subversive view of society is complete nonsense. He was the most upstanding, traditional upholder of everything English and everything Establishment.’ My own experience ...”

“... where the tiny, deaf Adolf Loos (‘ornament is crime’) held court; he knew Man Ray and Lee Miller; Berthold Lubetkin lived in the same building; he was good friends with the photographers Andor Kertész and Bill Brandt as well as most of the leading painters and sculptors. But an enduring sense of his own superiority (as a child, after a poor exam ...”