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“... the novelist will have to withdraw? I do not think so: love and crime have more in common than may appear at first sight. Love is one of the revolutionary forces of modern times: in its intense and individualistic form, it has increasingly subverted the preoccupation with prestige and property that once governed marriage and, indeed, society as a whole. It ...”

“... to the present, can help us all to feel more at home in this strange place. Nostalgic historians may be classified according to the times and places in which they locate their homes. Some, like Henry Adams, seem to discover that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey ...”

“... until you try to do it.’ In 1977, when this comment was first published, some younger readers may have asked themselves: W.C. Who? Typically, this was not a forced, would-be trendy allusion to current vogues of popular culture in the electronic media but an authentically personal image, implicitly framed in nostalgia. Nothing odd about that from an Oxford ...”

“... of instability, movement, pressure – something approaching synaptic assault, a feeling that may seem familiar to anyone who has spent time in Midtown or Lower Manhattan during working hours. This effect is amplified by the proliferation of reflections and refractions from the windows of the moving trains. Another tendency both poets share, and which ...”

“... at 40, Baudelaire at 46. If Baudelaire has never quite attained the hipster cachet of Rimbaud, it may be purely a matter of image. (Which is itself already quite modern.) Before Keith Richards, before punk, here is rock and roll animal Arthur Rimbaud with his anti-gravity shock of lightning strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the ...”

“... Hollywood finance on Leaving Las Vegas.) Modern Hollywood is in denial about booze. Hard drinking may still have a glimmer of the macho aura that surrounded it when the Hemingway-influenced generation of screenwriters filled the studio writers ‘buildings in the Thirties, but in Nineties blockbuster movies even policemen and criminals mostly drink ...”

“... accidental meeting with his daughter, who has not (as he supposes) come to see him. Remittance men may not have disappeared off the face of the earth, but they are no longer commonly found in fiction. An interview between a man and his wife’s lover about arrangements for the separation leads to a moment of self-discovery which takes its force from the ...”

“... be honest, without pretensions; the poetic problem, or part of it, that to strip away all colour may leave only a faint wash. Because the language is so neutral, it is the form in these lines which eye and ear find themselves debating. A slight awkwardness can add charm and authenticity: but when I come to the tenth line, which has the right number of ...”

“... Things do happen, things do get done and said in the stories, even though sometimes people may be talking at cross-purposes at times, or seemingly to no good purpose. KB: I’m interested in those stories which appear in different forms in different collections. Are they different versions of one story or different stories? RC: I feel they’re ...”

“... around 400 ad by holy men, like bishops, then by other categories, including those kings who may or may not have been saintly. Louis IX of France was the first major king to be made a saint. His reign, from 1226 to 1270, forms the middle episode in an unbroken success story for the French monarchy, a story which had ...”

“... to the best in poetry. In all the arts, there are broad movements which are inexorable. You may choose to swim against the tide, and perhaps do it very well, but you can’t turn it back; and English poets for half a century have mostly chosen to swim against what my hunch as a literary historian tells me will prove to have been the major tide of poetry ...”

“... single proposition to be made which was ‘not deceitful, and the tying our reason too close to it may in many cases be destructive. Circumstances must come in.’ In the 18th, David Hume believed that ‘parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle’, were ‘perhaps the most extraordinary and unaccountable phenomenon’ that had yet ...”

“... joke continues to run because James is worried about the worldly obscurity his stylistic obscurity may end in, and the comic heightening of their contrasted fortunes flatters even as it caricatures her. They share the joke, but it in no way settles their differences. In 1913, worried at James’s anxieties about money, she tried to get up a $5000 birthday gift ...”

“... Hume, who had earlier mocked the Sidney cult, found it ‘amusing to observe the general and I may say national rage’. Shortly after the exposure of Sidney, John Wilkes – in the House of Commons, of all places – extolled Cromwell’s ‘wonderful, comprehensive mind’ which ‘embraced the whole of this powerful empire’. A few years before, Wilkes ...”

“... groups of that sort did exist in New York and also in Chicago. But the great ones, though they may have occasionally frequented these foyers, were usually about their business elsewhere. Think, for example, of Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens, both New England insurance executives and both doing the entirely unexpected things they chose to do, while ...”