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“... and inventions we associate with the late 19th century, with Dostoevsky and James, George Eliot and Pontoppidan; those drew on the openings and possibilities of a competitive capitalism, in which robber barons and monopolies signified an expansion of individual and collective power. This American version, in the late 20th century, signifies ...”

“... largely by technological possibilities. From the mid-1970s, Frederick Sanger at Cambridge and Walter Gilbert at Harvard had developed ways of working out the nucleotide sequence of particular genes – ‘reading their code’ – and at NINDS Venter adapted those methods, slow and laborious as they then were, to determine the sequence of the adrenaline ...”

“... a sharp word for a daughter-in-law who serves cockroaches as a delicacy.’ He quotes a scene from Walter Scott’s The Antiquary, in which the old mendicant factotum Edie Ochiltree is given qualified access to a moment of celebration: ‘A table was quickly covered in the parlour, where the party sat joyously down to some refreshment. At the request of ...”

“... He recognised us, but he couldn’t speak. Hugh was reading J.G. Lockhart’s Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott; a straw bookmark showed that he was halfway into Volume II. He had read Lockhart before: he had read all of Scott several times since he was a child. The lives of writers were one of his major preoccupations: this biography, written by Scott’s ...”

“... Arab armies had a clear advantage in terms of weaponry. Even the CIA and the US Secretary of State George Marshall predicted Jewish defeat. Without a secret Czech arms deal, Israel would probably not have survived. After fighting for a year, it had lost 1 per cent of its population. Yet the Nazi Holocaust did not become a focus of American Jewish life in ...”

“... grew out of all of these energies.It was prompted by a pamphlet, originally a lecture, by Walter Besant, which made the case for storytelling as a great art, as beguiling in its deployment of technique as painting and as harmonious in its own way as music. James was fine with that, but took exception to the notion that literature should have ‘a ...”

“... to get better throughout two-thirds of a lifetime?’ This was the man, a novice to movies, whom George Schaefer brought to RKO in 1939: a household name, a radical in politics as in theatre and radio, an iconoclast, a cultivated bon-viveur, a wise old man, a baby, a sophisticate, a tearaway – above all, an intellectual. He was entering a community, noted ...”

“... New York Daily News in the mid-Eighties, ‘Larry Schiller makes Baron von Munchausen look like George Washington.’ Yet at the beginning of this new book there is an appreciation: ‘to Larry Schiller, my skilled and wily colleague in interview and investigation, for the six months we laboured side by side in Minsk and Moscow, and then again in ...”

“... is no other issue ... to think about politically, but I don’t know how to measure happiness,’ George Oppen wrote to June Oppen Degnan in 1970 (an extract from his letter is the epigraph to Midnight Salvage). How, then, should women see themselves? As mosaics, fractured with the lines of putative and possibly regraspable pasts; as fluid, and open – like ...”

“... to upper-class and purposively vulgar fanbase. In its ranks were Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and George Melly, who all later wrote of this time as of a lost Eden. Larkin’s jazz column for the Telegraph ran from 1961 to 1968, a period roughly coextensive with Mod’s quiet rise and noisy fall. Trads embraced a louche, boho scruffiness (silly hats, sloppy ...”

“... The tide of modern art wasn’t long in coming: in the first Impressionist salon in 1874, George Braquemond showed an etching of Manet’s Olympia alongside an intriguing version of Rain, Steam and Speed. He captured some of the elements of Turner’s title – the wind-driven rain slashes across the bridge – but his train appears as static as a ...”

“... collected by Saatchi), on established Turner-winning Brits like Richard Long and Gilbert and George, on old bugbears like Warhol and Richard Hamilton. Shortly before Fuller’s death, he thought the tide was turning: Serota seemed to be coming into line, even Saatchi was investing in the School of London. Then it turned right back. In his last completed ...”

“... recur throughout A la recherche), engages the nature of his prose as well as his sentiments; as Walter Benjamin said, in one of the finest essays ever written on the novel, Proust’s language is inseparable from his ‘intransigent French spirit’. It is a language with roots reaching deep into the history of French prose from Montaigne through ...”

“... billed as ‘the laugh sensation of two continents’ at the Coconut Grove in Miami: the columnist Walter Winchell called it ‘vulgar’ and Bert Lahr, who played Estragon, got a letter asking what a star of The Wizard of Oz was doing ‘in a play which is communistic, atheistic and existential’. ‘This Miami fiasco does not distress me in the smallest ...”

“... time to time this makes people think in the wrong tense: ‘“What was all this, anyway,” mused Walter grimly, “but the physical evidence of all the more fundamental changes that had taken place in Singapore in the last two decades?”’ On occasion quotation marks appear at random in passages of free indirect style: ‘He began to think about other ...”