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“... he hated. He got through by learning to box, by falling in love with a boy he referred to as ‘Dick’ (actually called George Harcourt Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone, later 3rd Baron Derwent), and by joining a poetry society run by some charismatic masters. He said in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, written in 1929 when he was only 34, that by the end of ...”

“... of adults like to do. (It’s hard to imagine Theresa May gearing up to speak on the matter. Or Philip Hammond. Boris Johnson perhaps, but he’s off the pitch.) And yet the craftier Tories, if any still exist, may see this as an advantage: the party can adopt its traditional, electorally friendly posture in defence of the sanctity of childhood – the same ...”

“... There remains a most decided difference – indeed it grows wider every year – between what Philip Larkin calls ‘being a writer’, or ‘being a poet’, and managing to write something which will delight or amaze people without their having to respond to it in the context of poets and writers. Religion and other activities used to concentrate an audience by figuring in a non-literary context, and Blake or Emily Dickinson used religion, as they used the context of childhood responses, to appeal directly to an audience over the head, as it were, of literature ...”

“... do so.No one in Washington has indulged in this form of shame more fiercely than Rumsfeld, except Dick Cheney. In Bush at War, Rumsfeld is presented as a grouchy, beguiling politician. ‘In some respects,’ Woodward writes, he ‘was a walking example of what novelist Wallace Stegner calls “resilience under disappointment”, the persistence of ...”

“... graduate seminar called ‘American Literature Unbound’, in which students studied Moby-Dick and Beloved during a term punctuated by communal outings to Ocracoke, a barrier island off the North Carolina coast, and Somerset Place Plantation near Edenton, North Carolina. Tompkins was thrilled by the sense of immediacy, intimacy and improvisation ...”

“... And he is generous in his assessment of the degree to which books are taken seriously in America. Philip Roth, a notable survivor from a slightly later generation, suggests, in the course of one of this fresh instalment of Paris Review interviews,1 that the USA is a society where, for a writer, ‘everything goes and nothing matters.’ Far from being ...”

“... Fortunate Family’, a poem Halleck wrote during his adolescence. It tells of a boy called Dick (‘a name that may have doubled as slang for an erect penis since the 17th century’) and his brother Bill, who runs away to sea. So far so routine. But Hallock interposes a jaunty paragraph on sodomy and piracy ‘on the high seas’ in the 17th and 18th ...”

“... a tailor, a lacemaker, a potter and a jeweller all died better off than the royals they served. Philip Rundell, diamond jeweller by appointment, was a millionaire. The personal assets of Queen Charlotte, his most important customer, were valued at £140,000 – diamonds, presumably, included. Some magnates with the Midas touch ...”

“... Vietnam protesters at the Pentagon march or losing to the Gore Vidal/Janet Flanner tandem on the Dick Cavett show. This self-centred writer – who returned to public prominence after a bad Fifties by publishing a collection entitled Advertisements for Myself (1959) – has chosen for this anthology the most personal material from his collected ...”

“... to develop a sense of active community. Who, after all, is remembered as a leader of London? Dick Whittington, perhaps Herbert Morrison. Ken Livingstone has dealt mostly in symbolic politics – there was little else left to deal in – but he will be remembered as the man who gave Londoners their only revelation of common identity since Marshal Goering ...”

“... Philip Larkin gave the name High Windows to what proved to be his last collection of verse (published in 1974, 11 years before he died). The phrase had been used as the title of one of the poems included, and also occurs at the poem’s end: the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless ...”

“... five years in the 1990s as CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil and gas services company, Dick Cheney drew $44 million in salary from an outfit that on his own Brechtian admission saw war as offering ‘growth opportunities’. Millions of dollars more in ‘deferred compensation’ were earmarked to tide him over during his time in government. In ...”

“... out on the internet. You were ranked thirty, and David Remnick was eight positions ahead of you. Philip Gourevitch was ranked number eleven. They are both ahead of you.’ Nina, pulling her son aside during the same dinner: ‘It seems like you don’t really know me.’ Semyon, again to Shteyngart’s wife: ‘When I was young, I kill sheep. Girls ...”

“... of remembering and forgetting are staples of science fiction. The identity terrors in much of Philip K. Dick’s work and the movies based on it (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Blade Runner; We Can Remember It for You Wholesale – Total Recall), and Pope’s ‘eternal sunshine of the spotless ...”

“... continuum. Updike’s Self-Consciousness is well up at the art-over-life end of the spectrum; Philip Roth’s record-straightening and strangely flat The Facts is, perhaps surprisingly, of the other type (and his intensely focused Patrimony is somewhere in the middle). Kingsley Amis’s riotous Memoirs are lifelike, too much so for some. Terence Kilmartin ...”