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“... offered the Polish crown: absurd, but can there be smoke without any fire whatsoever? In May 1575, Philip Sidney returned to Little England. If England was small beer, so was he, no baron but plain Mr Sidney. He was 20 years of age. Sidney’s career makes a bizarre episode in that endless saga which is Britain-in-Europe. To understand why so much was ...”

“... easy to épater les bourgeois as it used to be, what with Dennis Rodman, Ellen De-Generes, Howard Stern and other American mass-media provocateurs. Moreover, professional shocksters like Stern or Prof Streisand get away with outrageous behaviour by portraying themselves as traumatised ex-geeks or adorable social failures ...”

“... contains poems by D.J. Enright and Jerzy Peterkiewicz (not the best work of either) and stories by Philip Roth and the editor on what might have been: a Kafka alive in America after the war, a bachelor schoolmaster; alive in the war and fighting with the partisans. These are not merely jeux d’esprit. By making us imagine what might have been, they lend depth ...”

“... to preserve their secrets. They will fight impertinent biographers through the courts (like J.D. Salinger). They will (like T.S. Eliot or Jack London) set up vigilant estates to stand like pyramids over the author’s reputation and defy any tomb-robbing researcher. They will themselves incinerate mountains of correspondence (as did Dickens) or enjoin ...”

“... themes were tossed off with an insouciance that bordered on slapstick. Twenty years later, Philip Roth’s recent short novels create something of the same impression. Above all, Roth’s chronicling of modern American history is now little more than an alibi: the draft and the Korean War in Indignation, the 9/11 aftermath and Bush’s re-election in ...”

“... Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line which ostensibly owned the Titanic. (The real owner was J.P. Morgan, but that was a well-kept secret.) Ismay, who seems to have had something wrong with his brain, looked at it, stuck it in his pocket, and went into lunch. At the American inquiry he said he hadn’t really understood what it said. Asked by the ...”

“... of being a backslider myself, are bound up with the Gosse family. My grandmother broke bread with Philip Henry Gosse. Not many people know that. She had come in from Dartmoor where she was born, to seek excitement as a housemaid in one of the villas that were going up all round St Marychurch, and in one of which the Gosses lived. So they both worshipped in ...”

“... Revolution. When William Arnold first glimpsed the Himalayas he was reminded of papa: but then the stern Victorian paterfamilias stood firm on the solid foundation of expanding wealth and high dividends, a stable currency and a healthy balance of payments – the predominant ethos one of getting rather than spending. The same cannot be said of our own ...”

“... cautious, pragmatic, orderly, logical and unemotional. To their colleagues they appeared strong, stern, shy and silent; they took work home at night and at weekends; they had time for few hobbies or recreations; they jealously guarded their private lives; but in the select company of those who knew them well, they were warm-hearted, charming, kindly and ...”

“... to his new edition of the writings that Shaftesbury collected under the title of Characteristicks, Philip Ayres tells us this, and shows that Shaftesbury was interested enough in these enthusiasts to read Lacy’s prophetic writings, and to quote several times (without acknowledgment) from Lacy’s A Cry from the Desart, his translation of a French account of ...”

“... poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights that were much closer to Ranald MacDougall’s Hollywood travesty of Kerouac’s San Francisco novella The Subterraneans than to the disciplined delivery of the Six Gallery poets: McClure, ...”

“... death. In the Sixties, Hannah Arendt was very Sixties. Her friends in America were of the Left – Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy (her generous literary executor) and Dwight MacDonald – and she supported, usually with some individual overtone, the advanced causes of the era, from Castro to Vietnam. In the early Sixties she achieved a succès de scandale with her ...”

“... The Roman aristocracy’s overweening superego is distilled in these lines. As they reproduced the stern decrees, students absorbed the art of the grammatical and political imperative, the law of life that divides humans into those who command and those who obey. Children were taught the worth of disciplined labour so that as adults they could discipline ...”

“... to the conventional if contested motif of the elderly sybarite – best known from the fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike – whose declining sexual picaresque is set against historical or social forces which leave the ageing roué flummoxed and rueful. The Escape, or rather its protagonist, evinces a worldview that is best described as aspirant ...”

“... and even in conclusion – Mia Rodrigues-Salgado, for example, feels that the enterprise increased Philip II’s reputation, particularly in the north – but they all of course agree in trying to place the disastrous voyage in its context. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to know just where the borders of the context lie, and indeed where any historical ...”