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“... face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire also of the Greeks: ‘The children are so horrid: have ...”

“... had a bad stammer, and his puns were delivered with effort, after a period of voiceless struggle. John Clare described him approaching ‘a joke or a pun with an inward sort of utterance ere he can give it speech till his tongue becomes a sort of Packmans strop turning it over and over till at last it comes out wetted as keen as a razor.’ De Quincey ...”

“... to name only a few. Yet almost at once there came rumblings from Cambridge. Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, Andrew Jones and others rightly emphasised the Victorian politician’s relative autonomy from popular pressure, and cleverly unveiled the feebleness of provincial and popular reformers when they tried to operate at Westminster or Whitehall. Since ...”

“... newspapers we knew that Europe was the future; its parliament, if not exactly sexy, at least made John Major’s backbenchers foam at the mouth. And maybe Derrida’s trademarked ‘always already’, or Barthes’s writer who ‘can only imitate a gesture that is … never original’, spoke with more than usual force, in those end-of-historyish times, to ...”

“... sensibility, they’re caught in the crossfire of the intergenerational squabble that caused David Foster Wallace, speaking for ‘the children of all the impassioned infidelities and divorces Updike wrote about so beautifully’, to characterise the typical Updikean baby boomer as ‘an asshole’. Gates’s men are often assholes, no question, but in place ...”

“... American writing that have flourished and endured. Wolff sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David ...”

“... her fault, poor dear. Twenty years earlier she might have been trading poisoned darts with John Barrymore. But she and her sorority sisters were condemned to representing a girdled, uplifted world whose only edges were in the bones and stitching of their foundation garments. Faced with so much overwhelmingly off-putting evidence, the feminists, and ...”

“... when state funding started to dry up. Likewise, left-leaning community officers hired to foster civic engagement transmogrified into housing managers when faced with protests over rising damp rather than demands for art classes. This suggests that flexibility could be a snare as well as an asset, for as Ortolano puts it, ‘market liberalism ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue ...”

“... the bewildering complexity of the Iran-Contra affair, and got gates galore. Since Oliver North and John Poindexter had communicated their fell designs through a system called the Prof computer, and since the thing hinged so much on transfers of hot and dirty money, I myself proudly came up with ‘Profligate’ which, though it won me no prizes, did get ...”

“... annual stipend so he could concentrate on his poetry, only to commit suicide two years later; to John Quinn, a lawyer and collector to whom T.S. Eliot gave the manuscript of The Waste Land; to James Laughlin, founder and editor of New Directions (or Nude Erections as Pound liked to call it); to Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry; to Scofield Thayer and James ...”

“... This​ book is a departure from John Carey’s normal mode, much more intently introductory than anything else he has written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness and hospitalisation’) or indeed with other sorts of knowledge that might be thought fairly general (‘Totalitarian regimes seek to control every aspect of life, including writing ...”

“... Her report suggests that the diagnosis of abuse by a satanic cult makes it possible for carers and foster-parents to ‘care for very damaged children with patience and sympathy’. However, she says, the belief has also encouraged fears of an unknown evil among child protection workers ... and seems to generate an obsessional desire to find out what happened ...”

“... do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government ...”

“... understood payback. He dishes out the same kid-glove treatment to Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, even John Major, whom he was meant to despise because of the help the Tories had offered to Republicans trawling for smears during the 1992 election. ‘“I kind of like old John,” Clinton said, “but a lot of people ...”