“... wharfinger who soon succumbs to cholera. Adopted by a parson and educated as a doctor, his son William turns up at Guy’s Hospital playing hand to the mind of James Hinton – a surgeon in whose philosophy the Ripper’s role as ‘time’s abortionist’ is first outlined. White Chappell is preoccupied by the Ripper ...”

“... standard Twickenham Edition of Pope’s poetry, the volume given over to The Dunciad, edited by James Sutherland, attempts to present both the 1729 and 1743 versions of the work. It is wonderfully scholarly and informative, and unreadable except by the most sedulous academic. Sutherland’s notes bewilderingly intertwine with Pope’s, and the annotations ...”

“... a hand upon them and would have been indignant if anyone had made the familiar imputation – as William Cory and Oscar Browning were at Eton when their open interest in good looks was rewarded by the headmaster’s request that they resign from the staff. Benson published Cory’s poems and translations (‘They told me, Heraclitus’), which, together with ...”

“... paper. In the messier room across the hall, Karlheinz Stockhausen untunes a synthesiser, while William Burroughs randomly folds and cuts up his prose, and Robert Rauschenberg pushes a stuffed goat through an old tyre. That all these are denatured versions of Modernist practice is something Christopher Butler recognises. But, at least at the start of the ...”

“... he had, Hemingway did not serve in the Italian Army. It was about this time, we are told, that William Faulkner wore a Royal Canadian Air Force officer’s uniform with wings, and cultivated a limp, to none of which he was entitled. All this may sound very silly, but war is a great breeder of lies and the young Hemingway was behaving like a lot of other ...”

“... was that there was no dirty little secret.’ Repress the pang of pity. Recall what was said by James Schlesinger, former Secretary of Defence and yet another betrayed colleague: ‘Henry enjoys the complexity of deviousness. Other people when they lie look ashamed. Henry does it with style.’ All over today’s Washington there are men – Robert ...”

“... Peace. A season that had seen the deaths of the Beat Generation visionaries, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the folding-in, through reminiscence, of troubled minds, now delivered an icon that provoked a week of subdued hysteria. The extinction of a century that seemed increasingly self-conscious, feeding on its own entrails, penning obituaries as ...”

“... doctors had put a steel plate in his head’. He also told her he was an artist and ‘raved about James Joyce’.A year or so later, by his biographer’s reckoning, he fell in love with Mary Tolstoy, née Wicksteed. Born in 1914 into a North Devon family with impeccable fox-hunting and army credentials, plus a baronetcy extinguished when her uncles died in ...”

“... other three – in 1962, 1966 and 1972 – were based on plans by the prominent architect-planner William Holford. The 1962 plan put Eros on a pedestrian plaza surrounded by office blocks; the one from 1966 included a raised-level piazza with traffic running underneath. One response to the 1962 proposal called it an ‘atrocity’ that would ‘entirely wipe ...”

“... moon – the view of Earth from a spacecraft window is another famous Apollo photograph, taken by William Anders two missions before Armstrong’s. ‘It’s unreal,’ Collins said. And then: I’ve lost a Hasselblad. Has anybody seen a Hasselblad floating by? It couldn’t have gone very far – big son of a gun like that … Well, that pisses me ...”

“... of younger English poets who had heard rumours of Black Mountain College, read their Pound and William Carlos Williams, cannibalised Donald Allen’s influential anthology, The New American Poetry (1960), but never experienced a prime specimen of this fascinating otherness. Where Dorn was exceptional, as Prynne points out, in a conversation recorded at a ...”

“... took the role of Someone and eight years later, after an extended gestation about the length of James Joyce’s for Ulysses, Heller published the novel which set the standard he chased for the rest of his life. To the bold query why he never published another book as good as Catch-22, he would answer, ‘Who has?’ But at the same time Heller believed that ...”

“... and the New Republic, George Packer for the New Yorker, Rory McCarthy for the Guardian and James Astill for the Economist have produced great pieces. But even the most energetic analysts cannot move freely. Astill’s longest conversation with an Iraqi in Fallujah was with a man urinating against a wall with a suitcase on his head, and thus unable to ...”

“... violent, the writing here is far more reminiscent of Simenon – or, better yet, of Chandler and James M. Cain, the American noir novelists Camus so admired. Set in Algeria at the height of the civil war, at a time when reporters were often banned from entering the country, the Llob novels illuminate the darkest, most treacherous corners of Algeria’s ...”

“... good place not to go out from. A self-curated mausoleum of memories: photographs, toys, magazines, William Morris wallpaper, Arts and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and rearranging ...”