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“... than to engage in wordplay in the company of friends. He reported one such exchange in a letter to Thomas Walls in 1708: ‘A Gentleman was mightily afraid of a cat: I told him it was a Sign he was Pus-ilanimous, and Lady Berkeley talking to her Cat, My Lord said she was very impertinent, but … I thought her Ladyship spoke very much to the ...”

“... In​ the summer of 1963, between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a generation earlier ...”

“... five early adopters of synth/beat-box tech I personally called to mind weren’t so pale: Timmy Thomas, Shuggie Otis, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, Lee Perry.)But Schütte isn’t finished yet. Kraftwerk’s influence, it seems, also determined every molecule of 1980s electro-pop. They ‘set the blueprint for all later bands and musicians working in the area ...”

“... be acknowledged as an inspiration; defensively denounced, but perhaps more important, was Dylan Thomas. Thomas may have looked like an ‘ugly puffy fatso’ when he visited Cambridge during Redgrove’s student days, but he ‘kept visionary poetry alive for me and kept me alive too’. Redgrove’s finest early ...”

“... of Athens invites adaptation because it is already a collaboration – it was partly written by Thomas Middleton, who composed its city comedy-like scenes – and because the text we have is unfinished. Hytner drew in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius Caesar. To make Timon of Athens a play ...”

“... didn’t insist on crowding the landscape and interposing themselves; a previous vacation to St Thomas had been ruined for Alexandra and her late husband when their rental car was besieged in traffic, ‘surrounded by black drivers who took a racist pleasure in tailgating them’. Here Alexandra has to contend with the milder nuisance of a stock Asian ...”

“... The memory of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy from Kobani who was found drowned on a Turkish beach, has now been eclipsed by a passport found near the corpse of one of the attackers. That this assailant made his way to France through Greece, carrying a passport in the name of a dead Syrian fighter, suggests careful planning. The purpose is not merely to ...”

“... The Oval Window is packed with lines from a 1981 book on database systems). I once asked Thomas Nagel where I could find the line attributed to him in Not-You (1993) – ‘Love of semiconductors is not enough’ – and initially he denied having written it. When, having found the answer elsewhere, I put it to him, he was delightfully ...”

“... remembered and determining an inescapable future for everyone who was there. In On Chesil Beach (2007) – where the horror is of a different kind, since the disastrous wedding night is only experienced as horror by the wife who can’t even bear the intrusion of her new husband’s tongue when they kiss – the pivotal moment that derails two lives ...”

“... One of the greatest elegies of the 20th century was written in a flat-roofed Australian beach house beside scribbly-gums and banksias in 1975. The poem and the circumstances out of which it grew are painful. Nearly 20 years ago the poet allowed an Australian academic, Bruce Bennett, to publish details of the events behind it in Spirit in Exile ...”

“... the Serapis, commanded by Richard Pearson, and the Countess of Scarborough, commanded by Thomas Piercy – engaged the Americans, allowing the convoy to escape and shelter under Scarborough Castle.The battle raged for hours. Hundreds of people came out to watch. Cannon balls bounced off the cliffs. The Bonhomme Richard was slower than the ...”

“... be cleaner, more self-referential, more knowing or more minxy. In relation to Hollywood, Thomas Mann (from his perch at Pacific Palisades) had pronounced Isherwood ‘starry-eyed’, but Isherwood had learned more than Mann about gay sexual deportment. Carrying the Weimar spirit with him, writing with vitality, irony and humour, Isherwood deserves ...”

“... as ‘non-indigenous’) is Edge of Trees. It represents the line of vegetation at the top of the beach through which the first gaggle of British colonists looked for the natives who Sir Joseph Banks, urging the settlement, had said would not pose much of a problem. That line, across which black Australia stared back, was a threshold between visibility and ...”

“... of a shock is a bag lady finding a copy of Sartor Resartus in a Manhattan trash can. You think: Thomas Carlyle! On East End Avenue! Wild! Passages in All the Days and Nights suggest the earnest exposition of a local historian: ‘The business district of Draperville, Illinois (population 12,000) was built around a neo-Roman courthouse and the courthouse ...”

“... and what he is reading and wants to read. Yeats and Rilke dominate the talk of poetry. Edward Thomas, the figure behind the best poems in Raiders’ Dawn, is not mentioned. Lewis asks: ‘Will you copy for me Yeats’s poem “Solomon and the Witch” from the red Weekend Book … When I found it on the last morning I realised how much I needed it. And ...”