“... biography of Edgar Allan Poe with a recounting of his subject’s final days. Never mind that Paul Strathern’s recent biographical study, Poe in 90 Minutes, and a new novel by Matthew Pearl, The Poe Shadow, made the same opening gambit. It is a span of six days that has baffled first Poe’s family and friends, and then his biographers, since his death ...”

“... on Conservative economic policy. One of the most influential of modern Shakespeare critics, G. Wilson Knight, gave his blessing to Britain’s campaign against Argentina on the grounds that it embodied the essential spirit of Shakespeare’s plays. The myth of Shakespeare is also a powerful force for intellectual conservatism: its notion of essential ...”

“... connection with one still uproven fact of limited general significance’. On the other hand, Paul Hyams hailed it as a blast of fresh air and the sort of book we need more of, and Ernest Gellner was equally enthusiastic about its intellectual daring. I thought it was a splendid piece of work: a small book with large implications. Moreover, in its main ...”

“... at least not to journalists – about his working life prior to his arrival at Dover College. When Paul Foot first disclosed Archer’s short-lived Police career (Daily Mirror, 30 October, 1986), the confirmation came from Archer’s lawyer rather than Archer himself. ‘His life story,’ wrote Foot, ‘shows that curious mixture of personal ambition and ...”

“... of foreign attack to justify new territorial acquisitions on the Subcontinent. In 1801 Tsar Paul ordered 20,000 Cossacks to ride south from Orenburg with the aim of beating Britain to some of it – though they had no maps for beyond the Oxus. This quixotic venture helped convince his courtiers that he had gone mad, triggering his assassination and the ...”

“... and Malraux would say no less to interviewers and critics, even in writing (notably to Edmund Wilson). In fact, Malraux may scarcely have set foot on the Chinese mainland when he wrote The Conquerors. Yet the book convinced no less a reader than Leon Trotsky that it was based on first-hand experience. It even convinced an old China hand like Jean ...”

“... Carlyle’s writings, with special attention paid to their political thought’, and Paul Johnson, whose high-pastiche polemic, Wake Up Britain! A Latter-Day Pamphlet (1994), was resolutely slept through. The Carlylean inflection can also be heard in the newspapers and magazines with which these writers are associated: the two Mails, the two ...”

“... of Westminster Abbey or There Will Be Blood? Even so, the author is not quite dead. It is true, as Paul Valéry pointed out, that many things are involved in the creation of a work of art besides an author; but this is to demote authors rather than to annihilate them. ‘What does it matter who is speaking?’ Michel Foucault famously scoffed. In real life, it ...”

“... it was, with America, uniquely among the combatants, still holding elections in wartime, Woodrow Wilson took the opportunity to ask the American people to express through the ballot box their views about the sort of peace they wanted. If they wanted his peace – the League of Nations and all the trimmings – they had to say so by voting for the Democrats ...”

“... compromised in any case by the absence of Bolshevik Russia from the settlement they imposed on it. Wilson, heading the strongest of the winning powers, may have had his flaws, like Tsar Alexander before him, but in Ghervas’s view is entitled to imaginative sympathy. He was no less moved than the tsar by high religious and moral ideals, which in his case ...”

“... his long and loving friendship with the self-thwarting Esther Murphy in The Fifties (1986), Edmund Wilson recalled how vividly, if also profligately, Murphy – whose particular tragedy was to have an alcohol-saturated writer’s block of mammoth proportions and lifelong duration – embodied ‘the special characteristics of our race of the 1920s: habit of ...”

“... more than her mother. She studied at the Slade under the all-powerful trinity of Frederick Brown, Wilson Steer and Tonks. It was 1910, and the students were advised not to attend Roger Fry’s Post-Expressionist exhibition. By 1914 Carrington, a mild bohemian, had cut her hair short, Mark Gertler and C.W. Nevinson were in love with her, and the world outside ...”

“... 19 entered Leeds University, where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse ...”

“... way for his colleague at York, Dr Frederick Coggan. Dr Coggan’s appointment – made by Harold Wilson – has always been something of a puzzle. He was almost 65 when he got to Canterbury and never really recovered from his initial, ill-prepared decision (in which he was encouraged by some naive press proprietors) to launch a ‘moral ...”

“... or wasn’t only, a pulp craftsman embittered by the faint praise he’d been lobbed by Edmund Wilson before the likes of Eliot and Auden announced themselves as fans. Slick magazine writers were no good either – ‘their scenes are almost tiresomely neat … but they are little men who have forgotten how to pray’ – and when discussing the right way ...”