“... least on the face of it, be non-violent. In the 1960s Margaret Lovatt lived for six months with a young male dolphin called Peter as part of a Nasa project to teach dolphins to speak. The pair grew extremely close. Peter would often get sexually aroused and rub himself against Lovatt, disrupting their language lessons. Eventually Lovatt started to masturbate ...”

“... they entered Elizabeth’s court under the tutelage of Sidney’s father. With Edward Dyer the young friends formed that ‘happy trinity’ of poets, Sidney Striving with my mates in song, Mixing mirth our songs among. In 1577, the all too early peak of Sidney’s political career, Greville accompanied him on a mission to strengthen the co-operation of ...”

“... And now, here’s The Pale King, this book-shaped version of the ‘long thing’, assembled by Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor on Infinite Jest, from ‘a neat stack of manuscript, 12 chapters totalling nearly 250 pages’ discovered by Wallace’s agent on the desk in his home office, augmented by a selection from ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of less ...”

“... that reaction to the novel would have been rather different if the narrator’s love object, the young man whose tutor he is, had been female. These days there can be a blanket acceptance of behaviour that half a century ago would have been condemned no less unthinkingly. It’s still a double standard even when it seems to benefit you. The idea that the ...”

“... times were changing, and we might see his hopeful trend exemplified, a few years later, in the young Louis MacNeice. MacNeice studied philosophy under a pupil of Bradley’s, and spent part of one summer holiday ploughing through the required reading while staying in the South of France:I was very fond of Bradley’s dictum that every judgment … is a ...”

“... to straighten it out: it represents the consciously exercised preference of a lifetime. One of his young favourites, Harry Stafford, who was 18 when he and Whitman began to share a close attachment and, whenever opportunity offered, the same bed, reported to Traubel years later that when Whitman stayed at the Stafford home, ‘he would make a great mess of his ...”

“... of Bob Hope, from the folk figure of Kiepenkerl (a travelling pedlar in medieval Germany) to Michael Jackson and his pet chimp Bubbles, showed a canny sense of the capaciousness of kitsch. But the social unease produced by a conscious display of bad taste wasn’t at all the point for Koons, who, in Warholian fashion, insisted on the sincerity of his ...”

“... attempts are being made to argue that you can make ‘safe’ cuts by spending more effectively. Michael Gove, the education spokesman, is particularly strong on this. But one thing the Thatcher governments did demonstrate is that there are no ‘safe’ cuts to be found in the public services – or, if there are, no one has yet found where to make ...”

“... purposes, saints were grouped in hierarchical choirs. After the Virgin Mary, the Archangel Michael and the apostles, the most prestigious were martyrs, followed by confessors (such as doctors of the Church, bishops, hermits and monks) and, in a special category, virgins. Curiously, Byzantium and Venice revered Old Testament saints, such as Job and the ...”

“... from Murdoch’s descriptive prose: ‘A memory came back to her from her Italian journey, the young David of Donatello, casual, powerful, superbly naked, and charmingly immature.’ And no one could read more than a couple of her novels without recognising that they usually take place in summer, often in a large house, and rarely shift their gaze ...”

“... man of 19th-century literature who reappears in all modernising countries: the ‘alienated young man of promise’, who has been ‘educated into a sense of hope and entitlement, but rendered adrift by his limited circumstances, and exposed to feelings of weakness, inferiority and envy’. Today, he claims, ‘hundreds of millions of people’ are ...”

“... to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. He would like to have written Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Threaded into each of his plays is a coded tribute: an MP in Dirty Linen, a clerk in The Invention of Love and two characters in Leopoldstadt are all called Chamberlain, doffing their caps to Stoppard’s long-term assistant, Jacky ...”

“... primitive banks and setting up grey markets with the tacit approval of royal officials. And, as Michael Kwass showed in his brilliant Contraband (which I discussed in the LRB of 8 January 2015), where legal workarounds failed, criminal gangs stepped in with huge smuggling operations.Fashionable clothing was just one of the products flooding into urban ...”

“... marked ‘Kultur’ in one hand and a swooning, half-naked maiden in the other. The poster urged young Americans to ‘destroy this mad brute’.In wartime propaganda, as in the newly created ‘Western Civ’ surveys, civilisation was seen as the creation of Ancient Greece and Rome. ‘Plato to Nato’ courses may have introduced the mediating influence of ...”

“... shouted at the FBI agents who came to her cold-water apartment in Manhattan in 1956, looking for a young dissident writer from Yugoslavia. It was her first encounter with ‘the Big Reality that had undone so much of Hollywood, of New York. Had killed the Rosenbergs and was even then gunning for Wilhelm Reich.’ Di Prima forced the agents into the ...”