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“... Dow chemicals and other hardly virtuous multinationals etc, etc. Opening every chapter with a stern quotation – ‘Thou shalt not store up treasures on earth,’ ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house’ – Fittipaldi explores these scandals one by one, quoting generously from the documents in his possession, a number of which he presents as ...”

“... fretting to escape the inconvenience of some vulgar stiff and get at those rough flint churches. Philip Larkin (sans bicycle clips) with a Byronic makeover. Larkin reimagined by Barbara Cartland, all scowls and flashing coattails, piercing glances. This wholesome, outdoorsy Englishness, bracing weather and privatised mayhem between consenting adults, has a ...”

“... US State Department, human rights advocates and military humanists grew more intense after 9/11. Philip Bobbitt, counsellor to several American administrations, and muse to Blair and Cameron, asserted in The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (2002) that ‘no state’s sovereignty is unimpeachable if it studiedly spurns parliamentary ...”

“... for American writers who prefer the national mannerism of the barbaric yawp. Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Rush are exact contemporaries, born in 1933. McCarthy excels at antique dialogue and rapturous word-pictures of frontier landscapes; likes to portray violence; won’t represent thought; can’t do women; and has denounced Henry James and the ...”

“... Giorgio Vasari, among others – does him few favours. In contrast with Dante, whose features are stern and craggy, he is depicted as plump, melancholy and faintly epicene. Celenza’s book introduces us to the breadth of Petrarch’s intellectual world. Lyric poetry is only one corner of it: the Canzoniere and the other major sequence of Laura-inspired ...”

“... circles that sprang up on the cleared ground. There is no doubt that Dostoevsky meant to pass a stern judgment when he made the ‘harmless’ old liberal the father of Pyotr Stepanovich and the former tutor of Stavrogin. The devils that were loosed on the community were incubated in that muddled, innocent brain, which when put the question cannot even say ...”

“... he is given credit for, not least by Kafka himself – and so he slips away from Prague in time. J.P. Stern imagines him fighting with the Partisans; Philip Roth finds him a poor teacher of Hebrew in Newark, New Jersey. Whatever his future when he leaves Prague, he becomes what he has ...”

“... Lobby Practice, the slimmest of slim volumes, bound in burgundy rexine, which carries among other stern injunctions – ‘Do not “see” anything in the Members’ Lobby’, ‘Do not run after a minister’ – the overarching commandment: ‘Members of the lobby are under an obligation to keep secret the fact that such meetings are held and to avoid ...”

“... in mind – feature in practically every round-up of suspects: figures such as Clement Greenberg, Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling. But outdoing them all in his credentials for the title-role is Wilson, the freelance writer who never held a regular academic position and who, it is claimed, wrote authoritatively on questions of literature, culture and ...”

“... certificate that qualified him to teach in state-funded elementary schools. Second Lieutenant J.P.C.P. Raban RA (TA) in 1940, after the evacuation from Dunkirk. Tall, beanpole-thin, with dark skin and a shock of coal-black hair, shy and socially awkward, my father returned home to the village of Hadzor in Worcestershire, just outside Droitwich Spa, to ...”

“... take a vacant place at a poker game, say, and raise no eyebrows, which someone called … oh, Philip, say, couldn’t.’ At this a woman in front turned round. ‘I called him Philip.’ Then turning to her neighbour. ‘He said that was what he felt like inside.’ ‘I called him Bunny,’ said a man on the aisle and ...”