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“... Donoghue writes well on the gap between text and conversation, notably in the style of William Gass, which particularly depends on the page rather than the voice and couldn’t be reproduced by the ‘human voice ... without embarrassment’. He tends to say this of styles he dislikes, but it applies to others. And because he is talking more about ...”

“... Lincoln should be taken from them, since he was too merciful a man to punish the Southern slave-masters as they deserved. The nation was still almost as hot-blooded as old John Brown had been before the war, a cruel terrorist in the cause of liberty, declaring: ‘Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.’ Such the wild sayings. Gore ...”

“... One of the clinching confirmations of Anthony’s account of his wretched schooldays came from Sir William Gregory, who was at Harrow with him. On reading An Autobiography, Gregory recalled that Trollope was a big boy, older than the rest of the form, and without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met. He was not only slovenly in person and in ...”

“... but they were smart and talented, as were the painters associated with the gallery: William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Larry Rivers, Norman Bluhm and Fairfield Porter. It all made for a vigorous little scene, a fair bit of it played out at the ...”

“... these activities was much admired, although Arnold, in his judicious way, ranks Yeats below such masters of the craft as Ralph Caldecott and Phil May. In the early years there can have seemed little reason why Yeats should not have made a successful career in this kind of journey work, and he energetically produced drawings for visiting-cards, bookplates and ...”

“... cranky with each book he published after the USA trilogy. Of the stars of the class of 1918, only William Faulkner survived gracefully, protected by a thick cloak of obscurity until the very end. The class of ’45, those writers who attained majority, or at least draft age, during the Second World War, is more difficult to assess: they are closer to us, and ...”

“... to adapt a phrase, a prong short of a pitchfork. And whereas Pynchon and Algren, and more recently William Vollman, tend to have sought out big city trash, Benedict is more at home among the rocks and trees with God’s own good dirt. His one fully-committed excursion from the bush, ‘At the Alhambra’, describing a vacation in Nicaragua, is his least ...”

“... only respectable enthusiasm, his love of the arts. Emma Hart was in Rome and about to marry Sir William Hamilton: in the nick of time, just as her looks were on the turn from voluptuous to blowsy. Kauffman painted her as Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, holding a theatrical mask which she appears to be in the act of removing, though to some minds she might have ...”

“... plantation household’. And in Slavery in White and Black the Genoveses describe how Southern masters came to believe that ‘enslavement, broadly defined’, was the natural condition of humanity. Pro-slavery logic ‘encouraged assimilation of all dependent (unfree) labour to slavery’. Good Christians were enjoined to ‘accept some form of ...”

“... to attempt to join the morning after and Aristotle’s Ethics’ – frequently recalls other masters of strange, urgent sentences: Monty Python; Samuel Beckett; Chris Morris in Blue Jam; and perhaps most vividly of all, Vivian Stanshall in Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. In fact, A Humument is a novel of quotation: not only in the sense that all of its words ...”

“... officer on the Copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) until he fell out with his colonial masters. His first offence was to encourage miners’ trade unions. Then, in the early 1950s, he rebelled against Britain’s appalling plan for a Central African Federation (this in effect created a second and vaster apartheid South Africa, placing the enormous ...”

“... as, if not equal to their own, certainly worthy of respect. Take the great Orientalist Sir William Jones (of whom Jasanoff might have made more), who declared Sanskrit – one of many languages in which he was proficient – to be ‘more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either’. The Persians were, he ...”

“... not her real forename; ‘Crafts’ may be a tribute to Ellen Crafts, who with her husband, William, made a daring escape from slavery in 1848 disguised as a white male. Whoever ‘Hannah’ was, she lives now in the pages of her book, and we need to look within the text to find out who and what she was: and since it has many autobiographical ...”

“... it [the text] was telling me’. Maurice Blanchot once wrote that translators are ‘the silent masters of culture’. Kate Briggs amends this, commenting that Blanchot wrote ‘hidden masters of culture’ and that it’s ‘our recognition’ of translators’ ‘zeal’ that ‘remains silent’. In the publishing ...”

“... values which only the chosen few will be able to share or even decode. The irony of the Augustan masters was a sign-system of privileged implication, operating beneath a deceptive surface. The two passages I have cited are not discussed in Ehrenpreis’s book, but they are germane to it. In an earlier book of essays, Literary Meaning and Augustan ...”