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“... comfortable or the insufficiently harrowed reader: Laura had imagined herself to be in love with Nathan … Truly in love. A dizzy, silly, confusing, confounding love … Love. Secret and hairy and cinnamon-flavoured. A hot sharp-shooting sherbert love. A mishy-mushy, hishy-hushy, splishy-sploshy kind of love. But the love had been unreciprocated … and ...”

“... McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the ...”

“... being negotiated with France, reignited the wrath of the North Briton’s flamboyant co-editor John Wilkes and his backers in the City, prompting the publication of another withering issue, number 45. The new prime minister, George Grenville, and his secretary of state, Lord Halifax, decided it was time to put a stop to this constant assault on government ...”

“... which means about Roth’s personal history – because the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, is an American-Jewish writer, my age, born in Newark, whose earliest writing elicits a protest from some Jewish readers. But as a matter of fact, that about constitutes the similarity between my history and Zuckerman’s in that book. The ...”

“... tendency to weave stories where evidence is missing is the human brain’s sustaining feature,’ Nathan Heller warned in a recent issue of the New Yorker, ‘precipitating heroic action, senseless love and mindless hate.’ We are inheritors of worlds that acts of literary imagination have made, often without realising it. The story the Lippi painting tells ...”

“... five years later at the age of 37. But it’s now available in a meticulous English version by Nathan Pinkoski, and Perreau-Saussine’s argument is as potent as ever: that MacIntyre’s changes of mind were not so much lapses or regressions as logical stages in ‘the evolution of a sincere philosopher’.In the preface to After Virtue, MacIntyre himself ...”

“... agreement with Hamas. On this occasion, in a sharp departure from precedent, US Secretary of State John Kerry explicitly blamed Israel for the breakdown in talks. His special envoy, Martin Indyk, a career Israel lobbyist, blamed Israel’s insatiable appetite for Palestinian land and continued expansion of the settlements, and handed in his resignation. The ...”

“... Napoleonic Wars, a patriotic mythology fixated on the achievements of Nelson, Wellington and Sir John Moore at Corunna tends to filter out fear and uncertainty in favour of a seemingly inevitable procession of victories. As Jenny Uglow stresses in her gripping account of Britain during the Napoleonic era, contemporaries had no such feeling of security. There ...”

“... or so it seemed, the stage began to breathe again,’ the critic George Jean Nathan wrote. O’Neill’s output was Promethean. In the two years between the one-acts and his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon (1918), which won O’Neill the first of five Pulitzer Prizes, he wrote twenty plays. By 1922, nine original O’Neill ...”

“... for the CIA’s Polish operations at the time, is unimpressed.) Walesa has the air of a Polish John Prescott, only bigger. He has not carried the last 25 years as well as the other Poles. What is even stranger, I find myself in an assembly of political ghosts. Leaving aside the Chinese, who avoid public discussions, a surprising number of those who made ...”

“... in time.’ Moynihan is more than a little schadenfroh. He is at pains to remind us that he and Nathan Glazer opposed the liberal consensus through the lean years of the Sixties and Seventies, when it seemed to be working – as did Marxism; he can thus maintain with confidence, quoting himself and Glazer, that ‘the notion that the intense and ...”

“... to the Nazis were simply venal or opportunistic. There were Jewish dealers, such as the Dutchman Nathan Katz, who secured visas to Spain for himself and his family in exchange for selling paintings to Hans Posse, the buyer for the new museum in Linz. But many dealers in Paris and Amsterdam did very well indeed out of the war. The worst of them were not so ...”

“... ghosted memoir of her own and a reminiscence by the founder of her British fan club, David Nathan, and its secretary, Sylvia Hampton. Potential biographers might have been put off by the resistance of Simone’s daughter, who doesn’t want to talk about her mother, and many former friends and colleagues who refused to be interviewed or give ...”

“... professional. In the mid-17th century, the Royal Society established a committee including Dryden, John Evelyn and Edmund Waller, ‘to improve the English tongue’. Nothing much came of this. In 1658, Milton’s nephew Edward Philips had published a New World of English Words which reached its seventh edition by 1720. Swift busied himself with the state of ...”

“... application, always tied, seldom happily, to a university department, and agonising over a book. John Updike, who had a modest two wives and wrote 63 books, was, in a way, worldlier and more comfortable, finding nests at the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books that he never left. These writers are dead now, and the only thing that can be said with ...”