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“... of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be topical, to dramatise a few ...”

“... sound-bites from a phantom Smith Square manifesto. Two coppers can’t sit down for a swift half without debating the morality of capital punishment. (‘I happen to believe that the death penalty does deter, so what I’m saying is that I’m willing for innocent people to take a greater chance of being murdered so that I can salve my conscience ...”

“... process of an immense worm.’ In Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot’s War, Daniel Swift writes about the strangeness of Jarrell’s war: ‘No one was ever so far from the war as Randall Jarrell, deep in Texas.’ He started training as a pilot. ‘Flying is pretty dull,’ he wrote to Edmund Wilson, ‘and I’m bad at it.’ At the beginning ...”

“... that all interpretation is necessarily misinterpretation (reduced by calmer exponents such as Jonathan Culler to the uncontentious assertion that no interpretation can ever be final), and the dashing new formulation of the old problem of intention – Ellis argues with force and clarity. Moreover he happens to believe that some writings are more complex ...”

“... excitement). In a career whose contours provide another of Brewer’s telling case-studies, Jonathan Tyers, proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens, made it a place of music and art, as well as parade and flirtation. Those who paid their shilling might be serenaded not only by love songs and patriotic airs, but also by the music of Corelli, J.C. Bach and ...”

“... death. One Scotsman’s effects, listed at Calcutta, included the works of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift, a backgammon table, a hookah, four empty cases of gin and two Malay slave-girls: an epitome of Scotland overseas, outcome of a jumbled, contradictory evolution of Scotland at home. North America yields a crop of intriguing topics, from tobacco cultivation ...”

“... future’ that otherwise awaited him, one in which he never leaves Ohio or tells off Taylor Swift. She made him do his homework and kept him away from the local kids who smoked marijuana, threatening that ‘if she saw me in the presence of any person on the banned list, she would run him over with her car.’ He believed that she would do it: as a ...”

“... of legality and transparency and this in turn may stand in the way of an operation being swift and decisive. And the question of whether it is ‘do-able’ is vital – an intervention that fails is by definition immoral. Realpolitik criteria are not much less problematic, hingeing as they do on notions of ‘national interest’. Did the Kosovo ...”

“... Howl, are all ‘published in Heaven’. You won’t find his tributes to Gordon Lish (pen-pal) or Jonathan Meades (doorstepped) in any literary periodical. If you tracked down the originals, you might spot some of the elements that dress Seabrook’s whippy style: the Meades-to-camera performed prose, the music-hall delivery of arcane information. Seabrook is ...”

“... courage or the luck – from a project one had taken to be one’s own. ‘A courageous person,’ Jonathan Lear has suggested, ‘has a proper orientation towards what is shameful and what is fearful.’ We tend to think of giving up, in the ordinary way, as a lack of courage, as an improper or embarrassing orientation towards what is shameful and ...”

“... Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of ...”

“... number to take the step of insisting that George was among those included. Sixty years earlier, Swift had shown how cynically this line could be used:But now, go search all Europe roundAmong the savage monsters crown’d,With vice polluting every throne(I mean all kings except our own).Looking back on the previous century, Romantic writers found much to ...”

“... with John Kerry in Vietnam,’ the announcer said in the notorious TV commercial produced by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. ‘And they’re the men who spent years in North Vietnamese prison camps. Tortured for refusing to confess what John Kerry accused them of … of being war criminals.’ The tropes come straight from the Fonda mythology. A doctored ...”

“... beyond the stereotypes, though in fact there is evidence of a richer and more specific interest in Swift in Amis’s novels, from The Rachel Papers onwards. A poem called ‘The Place of the Damned’ is, incidentally. Swift’s contribution to the idea that hell is other people, which can stand as part of my contribution to ...”

“... last of the great New York intellectuals associated with Partisan Review,’ the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in a memorial tribute, ‘she was the only one in that crowd who understood and appreciated film in a wholly cosmopolitan manner, as part of art and culture and thought.’ Partisan Review’s​ intellectuals and their English department ...”