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“... natural casting as a failure. He is a classic writer, in the old Esquire tradition, a lesser James Salter, and a dedicated ladies’ man. Specktor’s chapter on him turns into a synopsis for a screwball movie with its account of the filming of what became 92 in the Shade (1975).McGuane and his first wife, Becky, lived in glamorously wild places ...”

“... interest is something he calls ‘literary vitalism’: ‘Frank Norris, Dreiser, Kate Chopin, James Branch Cabell’. As he sees it, these writers traffic in ‘the purifying effect of struggle’, all ‘Eros and Thanatos’ and ‘solitary acts of personal liberation’. Teaching Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, he finds his students ...”

“... recurs, in Turgenev, in Samuel Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his Confessions of a Young Man, blatantly proclaims his sense of liberation and relief when his father died. Synge makes an attempted parricide the theme of his Playboy of the Western World; James Joyce describes in ...”

“... control, from one age to another, often in the wrong order. I cross the Forth Bridge, bound from James Thin’s bookshop in Edinburgh to Waterstone’s in Aberdeen, remembering one of many student treks from Aberdeen to Cambridge. The train paused, shuddering, early on a January morning. The dark-red cantilevers sloped upward, huge as mountain summits, into ...”

“... one dining-club, Hart-Davis was occupied in editing such works as the collected letters of George Moore, Max Beerbohm – above all, Oscar Wilde – and later, now for many years past, in correcting the proofs of my own books with precision and severity. The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962) constitutes an achievement altogether unusual in its field of ...”

“... of the past. But not all Modernist poets used source material in such a coercive way. Marianne Moore, for instance, was as dependent as Pound or Eliot on the use of other texts, but her quotations are often taken from recondite works helpfully signalled in her extensive author’s notes: Report on the Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska, Antiques ...”

“... This was a formula which they had originally extracted from the last two chapters of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica and which stressed the virtues of civilised private life over the vulgarity of Victorian values, which came – if one is to judge from Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians – to materialism at home and imperialism abroad. Private ...”

“... head is charged with all your fighting blood. ‘I want to emphasise,’ she wrote to Marianne Moore, ‘the essential baseness of militarism’, and the poem is filled with images of questionable military might: Deep from protruding chests in green-gold medals dressed, planned to command and terrorise the rest The poems Bishop wrote between her arrival ...”

“... True, no. Room goes in for a lot of roguish commenting but not for annotation when it is needed. James McConnell, The Benedictine Commando, 1981 – For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night. Room: ‘The dedication suggests a quotation.’ And that’s true too. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, actually. An editor ought to rise to an occasional ...”

“... political consensus. Then I remember E.M. Forster’s image for the force that speaks to Mrs Moore in the echo in the Marabar Caves: ‘Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed, incapable of generosity – the undying worm itself.’ It’s this sense of an unbudging, implacable destructiveness that ...”

“... reasonably expect to find under the Christmas tree. The force at work here is a principle known as Moore’s law. This isn’t really a law at all, but rather the extrapolation of an observation made by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of the computer chip company Intel. By 1965, ...”

“... to write book reviews. In 1905, after Eton and Cambridge (where he served as an Apostle under G.E. Moore and thus first weakened his creative powers: too much ‘What do you mean by that?’), MacCarthy drifted into literary journalism via small magazines set up by rich and dotty friends. The idea was that such jobs would keep him going while he worked on the ...”

“... fifteen thousand of whose letters survive, has been cut down to a few hundred. Even Shaw and Henry James were reduced to four admittedly vast volumes apiece, a very small proportion of what is extant. Leonard Woolf, of whose letters eight thousand were available, has had to be shrunk to this one sizeable volume of about six hundred. His editor naturally ...”

“... have been quick to spot the opportunities presented by the crisis. Doubters need only think of Jo Moore, Stephen Byers’s adviser, who got into trouble for suggesting that the attack on the World Trade Center provided a perfect opportunity to bury bad news. The battle-hardened ideologues who direct American foreign policy are no less cynical, and ...”

“... the will, as Chesterton pointed out, means nothing if not the willingness to give things up. Tom Moore sang for his supper until there was nothing left of him, but it was not the fault of Holland House, which could be walked away from, as Byron proved. There is a crushing sort of determinism which tries to make social élites responsible for the corruption ...”