“... 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 ...”

“... just in time. The hero is mortally wounded, and dies, talking to the end, on a lonely beach. I have to take on faith from Anderson that El filibusterismo, like many another late 19th-century novel, has immensely more aesthetic energy than its silly story would suggest. And Under Three Flags certainly succeeds in placing the novel and its author in ...”

“... is a celebrant. ‘Thiebaud preaches revulsion by isolating the American food habit,’ the critic Thomas Hess, wrong as ever, claimed in response to the 1962 New York exhibition. But the question arises: without the alibi of irony, what was he up to, with his focus on consumerism in its most fugitive forms? One answer is that these were New York ...”

“... with the clouds scudding over the top. We passed into Scotland and saw a sign for Ecclefechan, ‘Thomas Carlyle’s birthplace’ as one of those brown signs reminded us. Karl thought the town might offer the chance of a sandwich. We slipped off the motorway and inched through the ordered trees to the town, which seemed like it had been put to sleep some ...”

“... and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved,’ only to write a little later, apropos of Thomas McEvilley’s remark that ‘somehow the age demanded’ Schnabel: ‘the notion that the man is an emanation of the Zeitgeist no doubt matches the artist’s fantasies about himself.’ It also, of course, matches what Hughes has just said about him. I ...”

“... of homosexual fellatio’. Then he cools us down. ‘That is to move too far ahead.’ Thomas Carlyle, another prodigious filler of shelves, reckoned that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men.’ The pathos formula perfected by Ackroyd. Carlyle did not enjoy such a smooth passage. ‘Swimming in the Mother of Dead Dogs, and ...”

“... in question, a prominent Chicago businessman related to one of the founders of the university, Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed. Bob Hutchins’s partisans gossip to this day about Maude’s psychic frailties. In a 1990 essay, entitled ‘The Sad Story of the Boy Wonder’, Joseph Epstein, an undergraduate at Chicago in the Hutchins era, compared her both to ...”

“... of money in Peru she and her sister had come back from South America to Miami. Sunbathing on the beach they had been run over by a police car, which had then reversed over them. Stephanie was dead and her sister in a critical condition.‘Add something,’ I note as I transcribe this entry. But there is nothing to add. A lovely, lively girl is senselessly ...”

“... him that night at UCLA, but before that we had the whole day. We took a cab first to Venice Beach, so that Jason could pay homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Remember when he says that he feels the pump and it’s like khumming all over his whole body?’ he asked wistfully. Then we stopped in a juice shop. A woman turned to me just as I was taking a ...”

“... of plain speech grew up in radical circles well before Political Justice advocated sincerity. Thomas Day, author of Sandford and Merton, who died in 1789, caused far more havoc than ever Godwin did by acting the noble primitive in the drawing-room. But Godwin’s journal also notes a succession of temporary estrangements, after excoriating scenes which he ...”

“... increasing weight; to his immense satisfaction he found that in the later stages of his obesity St Thomas Aquinas had had a semicircular piece taken out of an altar so he could continue to say mass, but in the winter of 1915 he dieted strictly and listened to his wife play the piano with greater attention. When the Italians declared war and advanced on the ...”

“... lobby was beautifully arranged. The room was wide with large windows overlooking the Herzliya beach: the view dazzled the eyes. I went over to the journalists’ stand, gave them my best smile and nonchalantly pulled out my press card. A feeling of importance came over me. The world outside was forgotten. The woman behind the desk checked my ...”

“... of Finnegans Wake, Jolas was one of the editorial entrepreneurs of Modernism; like Sylvia Beach and Harriet Shaw Weaver, a supporting player in the long-running and bloody saga of publishing Joyce that is central to the myth of the modern. Reminiscences of Joyce (or ‘Jouasse’) in his self-imposed ‘exile’, provide some of the sharpest ...”

“... and also, among the twinkling lights out there, you could find the uncelebrated birthplace of Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolinian who wrote Look Homeward, Angel. As the truck got nearer the Waffle House, someone on the radio made the point that North Carolina was itself no stranger to hurricanes – Hazel (1954), Hugo (1989), Fran (1996), Floyd ...”

“... Sitwell enthuses over a song about Havana night life. As late as 1959, the British historian Hugh Thomas recognised that Cuba was one of the few tropical countries to have created a modern culture of its own. He also noticed that Fidel Castro owed his power not to guerrilla warfare, as he had believed before visiting Cuba, but to television. The way Castro ...”