“... 39 which I wish you had asked me about’ is a typical opening to letters to authors and editors. James Joyce, for some complicated reason, ‘made a long attack on me in Finnegans Wake’. And so on. When in the 1950s she was mistaken, in her even-handedness, for a supporter of the witch-hunter Joseph McCarthy, she wrote to J.B. Priestley: ‘I have never ...”

“... writer Theodor Storm, read Fontane’s earliest work, largely historical ballads in the manner of Scott. Though his poems were popular, Fontane was unable to make a living that way, and turned to journalism, securing a job on a conservative newspaper. ‘Today I sold myself to the reaction for thirty pieces of silver a month and am once more a salaried ...”

“... to a plan which has been turned through 45 degrees – became fashionable. Some architects (James Sterling, for example) presented schemes using axonometrics which complicate things further by showing structures from below. Post-Modernism has changed all that and perspectives are once again respectable. Paintings, rather in the manner of Canaletto, by ...”

“... stories. Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, was in the manner of her admired Henry James, but it did not please her, nor did it make any mark in the world of fiction. (Her earlier book of poetry, notable in no way, had been self-published.) At college and afterwards, she had written stories about pioneer life, but she saw no special value in ...”

“... animation on everything the poet saw and put into words. In a sense it was much the same for Henry James, that other great equivocator of the American literary scene, and always a great admirer of Whitman. James’s prose, even the late prose, is paradoxically as physical as Leaves of Grass, and in the same way. A kind of ...”

“... toy butchers’ shops. They’re bigger and grander than the one Dad made for Gordon and me c.1940 but whereas these joints are nailed into place, Dad’s were all made to unhook so we could serve them to our imaginary customers at the counter. 25 February. A propos civil liberties the government spokesperson most often put up, particularly on ...”

“... and architectural, aimed squarely at public figures, with the wig-maker’s block standing in for James ‘Athenian’ Stuart. The emergence of personality in portraiture, already apparent in Kneller’s work, was extended in Hogarth’s to the whole material world. Having made the transition from Smithfield to Covent Garden, Hogarth moved on again, leaving ...”

“... life – his marriage. Although both his son, who first exposed its extraordinary nature, and Mr James Lees-Milne, who has written the first volume of his biography, refer to it as a great success, it cannot be regarded as anything but a disaster in terms of Nicolson’s public career. Vita Sackville-West was the daughter of Lord Sackville. Had she been a ...”

“... the streets of Islington. Three years after that it became a public-private initiative, with James I underwriting half the costs in return for half the profits. In 1631, Charles I was persuaded to swap equity for debt, a deal that proved most unfortunate for the Crown. Thereafter, the enterprise contrived to stay private for most of its long ...”

“... that he had trouble finding room in his mind for anything that was bizarre or extravagant: ‘Tout ce qui était bizarre, extravagant, avait de la peine à entrer dans ma cervelle.’ Rose draws our attention to the word ‘worship’ (culte) and the insistence on reason, and wonders whether such thinking ‘might not be a type of folly in itself’. The ...”

“... a private prosecution against the magazine on a charge of blasphemous libel because of a poem by James Kirkup it had published which described Jesus having sex with a variety of men, including Pontius Pilate. John Mortimer and Geoffrey Robertson appeared for the defence, but lost. Gay News was fined and its publisher given a suspended prison sentence. ‘I ...”

“... have led one to suspect: some of this is true, some of it questionable and the rest of it false. (Scott Lucas, by contrast, thinks almost all of it true.) Orwell was indeed unsociable, anti-feminist and homophobic, but only ambiguously anti-semitic, and by no means such a dewy-eyed idealiser of the plebs as some have imagined. Both Bowker and Taylor record ...”

“... the end of her long career, Braddon had earned a grudging respect from her contemporaries. Henry James acknowledged that her novels were ‘brilliant, lively, ingenious and destitute of a ray of sentiment’. In a letter of 1911 he told her that ‘I used to follow you ardently.’ But after her death Braddon’s reputation declined, along with the ...”

“... famous aesthete-sleuth – polo player, expert in Chinese ceramics, former student of William James – whom Raymond Chandler regarded as ‘the most asinine character in detective fiction’, and on some level that’s probably the point. (‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance,’ Marlowe says later on.) Even so, it’s surprising that Marlowe ...”

“... Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and it didn’t seem as though they were pulling in opposite directions (as James Leslie Mitchell, his real name, Gibbon was, after all, a socialist internationalist). For the rebellious, rebellion was still an individual, not a corporate activity; not the rebel as Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace plus army, but the rebel as Sid Vicious or ...”