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“... had possessed the native cynicism of Leigh Hunt himself, or – a rather different kind – of Robert Bloomfield, the rustic poet who in 1804 had been paid nearly £4000 for his two little volumes, he would have ruined his gift but he might have made big money. As it was, his best things are so good because they were not the things he wanted to do. The ...”

“... re-creation of Gay’s play, and has been separately sung by, among others, Lotte Lenya, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Bobbie Darin. None of these performers mentions an unrefusable offer, nor could they, since their recordings predate The Godfather, where the line appears several times, memorably, in the first film, in connection with the ...”

“... investigates the life and personality of the flakier of the two men who created AA in 1935. Robert Smith (‘Dr Bob’) was a proctologist, stolid by nature and a heavy drinker. William Wilson (‘Bill W.’) was a failed stockbroker and a fully-fledged dipsomaniac. At a Faustian moment in Akron’s Mayflower Hotel – poised between the bar and the ...”

“... modern warfare, Lindqvist’s book belongs on the same shelf as Way Out There in the Blue, Frances FitzGerald’s brilliant study of Star Wars and the ‘high narrative gloss’ that continues to attend its development. When the Strategic Defence Initiative was launched by Reagan in March 1983, it was a technologically impossible idea: ‘a science-fiction ...”

“... to prevent, or make good, the consequences of bad loans and bankruptcy. As for the workforce, Robert Fitzgerald, in his account of the Rowntrees, points out that since ‘business and wealth were viewed by the Quakers as a God-given trust, labour could not be treated as a mere commodity’.In fact, some Quaker industrialists treated workers very ...”

“... effect on Carlyle’s style of this ‘literary apothecary’. Anthony Trollope and Edward Fitzgerald thought Carlyle had finally gone mad, and former disciples such as Matthew Arnold denounced him as frankly dangerous, a ‘moral desperado’. Some of the mud stuck. It was soon apparent that he was unwholesomely fascinated by Blood and Iron. In ...”

“... leapt the strains upon the air. French children gazed in wonder – women left their washing.’ Fitzgerald’s ‘flappers’ flocked to Harlem in droves to dance to Duke Ellington’s music at the Savoy and the Cotton Club. Carl Van Vechten, whose novel Nigger Heaven helped to launch the ‘Harlem vogue’, wrote in In the Garret: ‘How the darkies ...”

“... one, wrong blond(e)s after all having some tradition in literature: Lord Alfred Douglas, Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe, to name but three who were all wrong, all right. This account of the relationship between Auden and Kallman is written by the blond’s late-in-the-day stepmother, Dorothy J. Farnan, also blonde, who, if not wrong, is not always ...”

“... to the mighty poets of Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch, among others. MacIver played some of the part of a father, taking Karl all over town to whatever was happening on stage or on screen. MacCaig was to become a lifelong friend, guide and admirer; they shared the same dryness of wit and much the same ...”

“... of misunderstanding between Ireland and England (as, according to Mrs Thatcher’s memoirs, Garret FitzGerald did in talking to her), Foster’s book would be puzzling and not very helpful. There are continuities in Modern Ireland, but they are difficult to trace. His book, because of his command of detail, and his ability to construct a narrative, is deeply ...”

“... and ‘absurd’ entered into common usage. One of Jeremy’s heroes was the war photographer Robert Capa, who had been blown up by a mine in Indochina in 1954 at the age of 41. The ideal life, we often joked, would have been to have spent the Twenties drinking with Fitzgerald and then been killed in Spain alongside ...”

“... He wanted to make everything glow and be great, and following Whitman, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe and Fitzgerald, he may be the last of the traditional American literary frontiersmen, opening the Republic up to itself, and romancing the earth. Kerouac’s greatest childhood friend and hero was Sebastian Sampas. Ann Charters, in a nicely understanding move, has ...”

“... time, at the Savoy Hotel, where he gave me the end of a bottle of whisky and wanted to figure out Fitzgerald. ‘We’re talking about the art of fiction in this interview, OK?’ I said during the Michael Shay dinner. ‘So I’m not going to be asking you anything about stabbing your wife.’ This was a big concession, journalistically, since I’d met ...”

“... solidity, but the past wasn’t solid while it was happening. Another tradition, of which Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower is the assuming apotheosis, sees research not as a chore or an obsession but as a sap that can be made to flow through every capillary of the text. Thomson’s prose has a striking lightness of texture, even when he produces one of ...”

“... Buchanan is nervous about other upstarts rising out of nowhere to challenge the master race. Scott Fitzgerald based Goddard, at least partly, on Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, the author of the bestseller The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920). Stoddard’s fame was a sign of his times, of the overheated racial climate of the early 20th ...”