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“... term, ‘natural kind’, which has been in use for well over a century. It is derived from John Stuart Mill and William Whewell, who both wrote of ‘kinds’, although the Cambridge logician John Venn may have been the first to use it in a work of philosophy. The term was intended to get rid of a lot of ...”

“... Windsors and the Georgetown ladies, and master in novel-form of the Washington of Henry Adams, John Hay and Teddy Roosevelt.Or is it so fitting? On second thoughts, is not Vidal a natural for the Protestant cemetery in Rome, hard by Keats and Shelley and Gramsci and Labriola, and sheltered, in serene pagan and Mediterranean style, by the pyramid of ...”

“... is not merely a mirror of nostalgia. It is also a useful tool with which to work in the present. John Fowles begins Daniel Martin with the words: ‘Whole sight: or all the rest is desolation.’ But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all ...”

“... and aesthetically cannot dissociate him entirely from their predicament. As a character of Saul Bellow’s observes, the deepest ambiguity in intellectuals is that they despise the civilisation which makes their lives possible, and prefer to contemplate one, or to create one mentally, in which this would cease to be so. But Canetti never commits that ...”

“... One of John Cheever’s most famous stories is called ‘The Swimmer’. It is set, like much of his fiction, in the lawned suburbs somewhere outside New York City, and it is filled, like most of his fiction, with despair. The hero, Neddy Merrill, the father of four daughters, is sitting by a neighbour’s pool drinking gin when the idea comes to him that he might reach home by doing a lap of all of his neighbours’ pools on the way ...”

“... between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a ...”

“... throw out an obnoxious member, they did not know how to do it. They sent the future Chief Rabbi, Saul Levi Mortiera, to get the advice of Venetian rabbis, who gave him the form of words. It appears that during the 17th century over two hundred and eighty members were excommunicated from the Amsterdam Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community, for non-payment ...”

“... the arms of a diabolically smiling Stravinsky, and a tabby startled by the regard of a reclining Saul Steinberg. Other props are more common and more affecting, chief among them the subject’s hands. One hand alone may clutch the brow (Martin Luther King, 1961), support the whole skull (Cecil Beaton, 1951), point its index finger into the upper lip ...”

“... of Italo Svevo, Bruno Schulz, Joseph Roth, W.G. Sebald. The method is less biographical for Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, Nadine Gordimer and others, and a long, frosty essay on Walter Benjamin engages crucial concepts thoroughly and ends in a magnificent, if ambiguous tribute: ‘From a distance, Benjamin’s magnum opus’ – The Arcades Project ...”

“... federal Republic will be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself,’ John Quincy Adams wrote when he was Secretary of State, at the time of the Monroe Doctrine, and even those who didn’t want to be part of the US but wanted independence from Spain looked to American democracy for a better system of government and often went into ...”

“... diaries, which Tynan bequeathed on his deathbed to his daughter Tracy. They have been edited by John Lahr, the perfect choice for the task – indeed, an inescapable one. Lahr is Tynan’s true successor at the New Yorker, reviewing theatre for the magazine, as did Tynan, and, more important, filling his loafers as its premier celebrity profile writer, its ...”

“... firecracker, because I have to identify myself with everyone in it, including the corpses, pal. John Berryman, Dream Song When we first meet him in The Sportswriter (1986), Frank Bascombe is 38 and trying to fend off the ‘dreaminess’ that has afflicted him since Ralph, his first son, died of Reye’s syndrome four years earlier. Now divorced from ...”

“... of course it did. Roth had initially encouraged, endorsed and facilitated Atlas’s biography of Saul Bellow, but once Atlas began cataloguing some of Bellow’s more unsavoury amours and making clucking sounds of bourgeois disapproval, he incurred the ire of King Saul. Roth took Bellow’s side, because of course he ...”

“... the sentence ‘unacceptable’ to speakers of the language. For example, in the sentence ‘John loves Mary,’ ‘loves’ may be replaced by ‘hates’ or ‘eats’, but not by ‘but’, ‘thinks that’ or ‘swims’. Now consider another example, discussed at length by Barthes in his Eléments de Sémiologie, the example of the menu. A man ...”

“... in this volume was altered substantially, the differences are slight. The annotation supplied by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan is, as always with a Longman edition, very full: it is especially detailed about the Brownings’ life together. It is good to see Donne’s influence on Browning being fully traced (Donne was not much read in this ...”