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“... War. There were Kipling’s vivid stories of Sussex life through the ages, and then there was John Buchan’s The Path of the King, tracing ancestral virtues and vices from a Viking prince to Abraham Lincoln, taking in the depravities of Titus Oates. Even before reading these quite gripping books, we were vaguely acquainted, through schools, comics and ...”

“... we learn the most from their personal memories, experiences, opinions. Do I claim to sit with the Masters? Yes, I do. His conflation of the historian’s mastery of ideas with an artist’s mastery of his craft is typical. But it would be a poor spirit who could mark the book down on rational analysis and ignore its proper virtues. If we can’t altogether ...”

“... I avoid all worldly fun. Many photographs of the visionary follow, taken by her Polish father. John K. Sagatis, who died, the book alleges, as a result of the wanton neglect of an NHS hospital. These photographs of an aspiring saint are fascinating: reproduced in the degraded colour of multiple xeroxing, they turn Sister Marie into a kind of performance ...”

“... such as W.C. Wentworth, ‘the lord of the lash and triangle’, Benjamin ‘Flogger’ Boyd and John MacArthur – all of whom we meet with in the narrative – came to control the land, ‘filling it with blood and the suppuration of needless misery’. What keeps this spirit alive, according to Hall, is the complicity of the people, a people who ‘are ...”

“... came his 1948 book The Other Side of the Hill (a quotation from the Duke of Wellington, who told John Wilson Croker that he had ‘spent all his life guessing what was on the other side of the hill’). This was military history from the opposing army’s perspective and with the politics and ethics left out. General Sir Percy Hobart, the most cussed of the ...”

“... the People contend for their Liberty, they seldom get anything by their Victory but new Masters.’ This, naturally, drew down thunderbolts of Sartrean abuse, which made permanent the breach between Camus and their author. Even now, Patrick McCarthy regards L’Homme Révolté as not merely Camus’s ‘worst book but one that did him great ...”

“... discharged. Perhaps this is why some of our writers, given the chance, become performing seals. John Malcolm Brinnin met Capote before his first novel was published and remained close to the novelist for many years,2 increasingly concerned about the extent to which his friend was cultivating his fame at the expense of his art. Brinnin had sponsored Dylan ...”

“... in Who do you think you are?), humorous essays, television plays. His TV adaptation of the John Fowles short story, ‘The Enigma’, was extremely skilful. To the general public he is probably best-known by virtue of the BBC serialisation of The History Man. This caused something of a stir a few years back, partly due to the excellence of the book ...”

“... paean to ‘the cavalier society’ of antebellum Atlanta, with its ‘knights and ladies, masters and slaves’. Atlanta was actually a frontier town, however, erected on expropriated Indian land barely a decade before the Civil War. Although General Sherman burned Atlanta on his march to the sea, retreating Confederate troops had already destroyed ...”

“... acquitted, the blame being laid on faulty charts or compasses, or force majeure; it is the masters and pilots who are likely to end up serving six months in the Marshalsea Prison. However, the captain of the Adventure brig achieved exquisite disgrace by being hanged at Execution Dock for scuttling his ship. One is reminded intermittently of Conrad’s ...”

“... it is true that some American magazines, notably the New Yorker, have welcomed the talents of John McGahern, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Edna O’Brien and Benedict Kiely, among others, one could give long odds against a manuscript by an unknown Irish novelist or poet seeing the light of first publication in Boston or in New York.So it’s back to London ...”

“... views literary experimentation as the God That Failed. Raised on the modernist and postmodernist masters, these writers – among them Eugenides’s contemporary Jonathan Franzen and a younger cohort that includes Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers – have come to believe that too much was lost – in moral and emotional engagement, in readership – when realism ...”

“... gathered not only from books but from countless conversations with Balkan people and their masters in peace and war, his politics were elusive. A Bulgarian friend asked how he could possibly want to visit Romania, after it had stolen the Dobrudja from Bulgaria and seized Transylvania from Hungary. Leigh Fermor retorted that he wasn’t a political ...”

“... to attempt to join the morning after and Aristotle’s Ethics’ – frequently recalls other masters of strange, urgent sentences: Monty Python; Samuel Beckett; Chris Morris in Blue Jam; and perhaps most vividly of all, Vivian Stanshall in Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. In fact, A Humument is a novel of quotation: not only in the sense that all of its words ...”

“... The most significant predecessor and rival to Foster’s Pop painters in using such tactics was John Heartfield, whose near-weekly montages in aid of European communism in the 1930s came from his own mastery of the image world, a pictorial literacy otherwise unmatched, at least until the First Age of Pop. This is one reason Foster speaks as much to Pop ...”