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“... So, then,’ says a founding father, quill poised, to the founding fathers around him in Gary Larson’s cartoon, ‘Would that be “Us the people” or “We the people”?’ If deciding what to write is tough, interpreting what gets written is tougher. Turgid texts need unravelling; obscure provisions need deciphering; occasional nonsense needs correcting; perfectly clear texts may be impossible to apply to novel situations ...”

“... Maeve Brennan​ could stop traffic. According to her colleague Roger Angell, she laid waste to a ‘dozen-odd’ writers and artists after the New Yorker hired her as a staff writer in 1949. She makes a cameo as the magazine’s ‘resident Circe’ in a biography of the cartoonist Charles Addams; legend tells that she was Truman Capote’s inspiration for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s ...”

“... people, and in a way you could say she had become one. The receptionist told me her name: Maeve Brennan. I had never heard of her, though for nearly thirty years she had been a staff writer – one of the gifted ones, with a steady cult following among the magazine’s younger writers. And I did not know that, a few years earlier, after suffering a severe ...”

“... book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places of Mind, Said was ‘a photo negative of his Jewish counterparts’.Said spent his first years at Columbia as a kind of an Arab Marrano, or crypto Palestinian, among Jewish and Wasp colleagues who were either indifferent or hostile to the ...”

“... country even seemed somewhat strange’. Hunting was a family passion. According to his biographer Brennan Pursell, persistence was one of Frederick’s main qualities (‘pursuing a single rabbit for three to six hours on a hunt was not beyond him’), while Elizabeth’s father liked to measure the passage of time by the amount of quarry killed. Concluding a ...”

“... at the age of 65, his widow and third wife, Carlotta Monterey, was visited by his cousin Agnes Brennan, the only relative O’Neill regularly saw, who told her about O’Neill’s childhood. ‘Unwanted, no love or tenderness, no care, no discipline, no protection!’ Monterey wrote in her diary. ‘If I had only known this fully – not in bits and ...”

“... have been intimidated by him but he was popular with his staff and particularly with the women. Mary Judd, the librarian at the issue desk at Hull, thought that ‘most women liked him more than most men because he could talk to a woman and make her feel unique and valuable.’ In last year’s Selected Letters there is a photo of him with the staff of the ...”

“... global account of imperialist and colonial exploitation proposed by Cooper and Du Bois. In 1904, Mary Church Terrell, one of the founders of the National Association of Coloured Women, published an essay which concluded that ‘lynching is the aftermath of slavery.’ A year later, William A. Sinclair, who was born into enslavement, published The Aftermath ...”

“... into the avid imaginations of legions of onlookers who didn’t know Walter Benjamin from Walter Brennan. Fascinated by Greta Garbo (‘I wanted to be Garbo,’ she wrote in her diary), Sontag managed to fashion a Garboesque mystique while carrying out the garrulous duties of a public intellectual for decades: speeches, interviews, conferences, symposia, all ...”