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“... the corpus of Mapplethorpe, and the life under consideration, with a bias, a predilection for what Susan Sontag once baptised ‘the pornographic imagination’. And if photography – Mapplethorpe’s, at this moment – incites my regard, it is because some great specimens of that relatively new art are indistinguishable from pornography. I want to see ...”

“... a stir: Donna Tartt, David Leavitt, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Nancy Lemann, Susan Minot, Mary Robison, Anderson Ferrell – a cast of dozens. Many of those rookies trained at the literary dojo of the author, editor, creative writing teacher and guru-mentor-mindgamer Gordon Lish, who bore the dashing nickname ‘Captain Fiction’. The ...”

“... Tuileries. He was well aware of the affinity between his subjects and ‘the heroines of Walter Scott’. Going a step further than James Fenimore Cooper, who saw the Duchesse d’Angoulême in Paris after the Restoration and remarked ‘I never see this woman without a feeling of commiseration and respect,’ Imbert de Saint Amand wrote about her ‘like a ...”

“... he respected Burns and Johnson. But he didn’t quite see the point of anyone else. He resented Scott, disliked Lamb (‘Wearisome, inexpressibly wearisome’), felt ill at the thought of Keats, complained of Hazlitt (an ‘incessant chew-chewing’), found Wordsworth egotistical (‘It seems . . . rather to grieve him that you have any admiration for ...”

“... Although first published in the United States, both books deal with England and other countries. Susan Faludi extensively revised her 1991 American edition for the 1992 British edition. This version, with a Preface by Joan Smith, includes information regarding the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. Marilyn French deals with Southern and Eastern ...”

“... of what the beautiful ought to be (but see Roger Scruton, below). To be sure, both Baudrillard and Susan Sontag have recommended something like a diet cure for images: that we try to be reasonable and reduce our intake, to fast once in a while perhaps, and exercise other senses. Yet this is pre-eminently an addictive society, and of all conceivable responses ...”

“... These are the questions the later part of the novel asks in subtle detail but doesn’t answer. As Susan Stewart says in her introduction, the initial crimes ‘gradually fade in relation to the story of Langlois’s astonishing response to them’. The locals worry about what has happened. ‘Aren’t there courts and an executioner in Paris?’ But they talk ...”

“... which had been found for them by a radical sports writer connected with Ramparts, called Jack Scott, whom Spiro Agnew had once described as ‘an enemy of sport’. Scott’s idea was that they should raise money for the revolution by writing a book about the SLA: it was bound to be successful and a corporation could be ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... student in Anglo-Saxon and philology. Later a series of women writers and editors – Evelyn Scott, Caroline Gordon, Katherine White, Eve Auchincloss – would offer nurture and support. But Stafford never had much respect for women. The women writers she admired show up in marginal, often diminished ways in the biographies. She named her cat George ...”

“... Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates ...”

“... to give him an award. Still Severn boasted of it (according to Brown, who, together with Grant Scott in his fine 2005 edition of Severn’s letters and memoirs, gives a good sense of the tone of the man), lying to his friends about the money it brought him. Worse, he had been peripherally involved in the catfishing of Tom Keats as he lay dying, a prank ...”

“... with women (‘Desdemona, before anything else, is A Woman’). There are also essays on Scott Fitzgerald, Twain, Emily Brontë, Stephen Crane, Traven’s The Death Ship, and of course Swift. It seems that no book concerned with the idea of the man of letters as man of action is nowadays complete without an essay or two on Swift: an honourable ...”

“... up the other émigré East Coast families, round up his own family, and then dominate them all. Susan Wilkins, one of the voices in the book: ‘My God, the father was something! A cross between Mr America and General Patton.’ Fuzzy would stride around, in a white bikini, and pronounce, in the sunshine. No one was allowed around who wasn’t ...”

“... film which is up on the screen turns out to be Budd Boetticher’s Westbound, one of the Randolph Scott cycle, although the voice that we hear on the soundtrack is mysteriously speaking some lines of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire. In a way, this aberrant moment summed up Godard’s appeal for me – the perverse mixture of Modernism with B-movies, as if an ...”