“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that ‘other Eden’; and the barbarity of its inhabitants was proven, in the words of James I’s attorney-general for Ireland, Sir John Davies, by their stubborn and perverse refusal to ‘plant any gardens or orchards, enclose or improve their lands, [or] live together in settled villages or towns’. The Irish rebels, according to Davies, were ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... behest, delivered a parcel containing a pair of old brown shoes to a distinctly unappreciative James Joyce. The shoes apart, Eliot was having a good time. He considered Lewis the most profitable person he had had to talk to for a long time. In Saumur, Lewis fell off his bicycle, and was soon looking for someone to sue. When, appeased by a row with the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... clinching evidence of the Hills’ reliability.The UFO Incident, a film about the Hills, starring James Earl Jones as Barney and Estelle Parsons as Betty, was broadcast by NBC in October 1975, bringing their story to millions of American households. It suited the paranoid mood of the times. Two weeks after watching it, Travis Walton, a forestry worker, was ...”

“... in France than in many other European countries. In Britain, most of them were repealed by James I in the early 17th century and the ban on Highland dress, imposed after Culloden, was lifted in 1782. But everywhere the three-piece dress, with its narrow waist and broad skirts, was the norm: this was the silhouette by which a woman of a certain social ...”

“... for these long hours she would not average more than 4s a week, and very often less than that’. James Allen, a shoemaker, took his employer to the Northampton Petty Sessions in 1879 alleging that he had not been paid £1 12s 7d for work closing uppers. In 1882 London shoemakers went on strike to protest against the practice of docking part of their wages to ...”

“... One particularly turbulent paragraph cites, in no particular order, George Sturt, J.A. Baker, James Agee, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Knut Hamsun and Elizabeth Smart. But I’m not being entirely fair. For one of these writers has already been singled out for extensive analysis.It’s an odd choice. Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) is ...”

“... 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 ...”