“... poets who had fallen under his spell, and felt driven to seek out biographical sources for the power and originality of the poetry they found so mesmerising: W.H. Auden believed that Eliot had had a mystical vision when he was a young child, Hart Crane was convinced that he was secretly gay, while Delmore Schwartz was a fount of scurrilous stories about ...”

“... Franz Werfel.’ In Venice in Harry’s Bar in 1950 he meets a man whom he introduces to all as Henry Green: He asked me to lunch the next day. I was surprised to find him accompanied at lunch by an obvious piece of Limehouse trade: I’d not thought H. Green ‘so’. I started to talk about books etc, but Mr Green didn’t seem to have heard of anyone I ...”

“... Kafka (the first English translation of ‘Metamorphosis’, again by Jolas), Michel Leiris, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Herbert Read, Soupault and Jolas himself. Glancing through its faded and disintegrating back issues or reading Dougald McMillan’s transition: The History of a Literary Era 1927-38 (1975), one finds an astonishing compendium of the most ...”

“... However noble his conduct in the face of death it’s difficult to feel much sympathy with him. Henry VIII is a devil but that doesn’t make More a saint.In the afternoon to Kendal and the Abbot Hall Gallery, notable for its collection of Romneys (Romney born in Kendal). Less taken by the finished portraits, which are staid and wooden, than by his ...”

“... awareness, prepared to lay oneself open to their influence, other places too can exert the same power of association. It may be of association with a person, with simple human emotions, with the past or some building looked at long ago, or even with a scene only imagined and dreamed of. This sense of association can be so sharp that it arouses an emotion ...”

“... an odd sound, but also a special credential, by which later bands looking to overthrow the Flower Power generation could assert allegiance to an alternative musical paternity. It is this contention of untimeliness that I’m most curious to dispute. It’s not clear to me that, following Witts’s own clues and leads, it doesn’t make more sense to freshen ...”

“... films like Flush Riveting and Disney’s long-range-bombing propaganda piece Victory through Air Power – didn’t improve with peacetime: Song of the South was condemned in 1946 for being both racist and lame, and other releases were essentially compilations of short episodes. Walt began producing live-action films but remained distracted. By the time of ...”

“... should be replaced,’ and the faux-Cosmati pulpit similarly. Apropos guides we are using Henry Thorold’s Shell Guide to County Durham written in 1980 which recommends a visit to Finchale (pronounced Finkle) Priory set in a bend of a river just north of Durham, of whose remoteness and unspoiled beauty Thorold gives a lyrical description. No more ...”

“... conclude, from this elevated passage, that the author was an articled attorney in his 20th year, Henry Crabb Robinson. Nor did Wordsworth in the Prelude ridicule the aspirations of the Rule of Benevolence and Reason – ‘a noble aspiration, yet I feel/The aspiration’:                                  the dream Was ...”

“... his erstwhile fiancée, Ethne. All this gets pretty tedious and repetitive and rather Henry James-like in its moral ramifications. It’s gone through so often that one wonders whether the repetition is because the book came out originally in serial form. Each chapter certainly has a subheading: ‘Durrance hears news of Faversham’; ‘The House ...”

“... view is ruined by the new solar farm, the once fascinating characters in the novel have lost their power to enchant, everything seems blurred or – the verdict from which there is no appeal – dated. Surely Raffles would be the least likely fictional hero to survive the cut. His exploits seem to belong, irredeemably, to the world of gaslight and hansom ...”

“... Didion-Dunnes or their world, but merely to recognise that depression gains a great deal of its power by handing the sufferer’s loved ones responsibility for it or blaming them for worrying about it too much. Either way, this lose-lose fandango can topple the busiest minds on the planet. Didion was dealing with the matter in the strictest privacy when she ...”

“... and that was all. Meyers’s ‘original reading’ makes the buck ‘an embodiment of sexual power’: ‘He walks with horny tread, penetrates the brush and creates an orgasmic waterfall so that his mate can make The Most of It’ And as for the word ‘come’, why, Meyers is delighted whenever it appears. In ‘Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the ...”

“... have the authority of Violet behind it. But if it is accurate, it only shows how the extraordinary power of a creative imagination transformed particles of experience into the universe of his fiction, since there is not the least hint of the enigmatic sexual waywardness of Jean in anything represented by Spurling of either woman in real life. This is not to ...”

“... worst anxieties to him. His father was a shoe salesman. In his early forties, after winning an O. Henry Award, Cheever went to see his mother. He reported the following exchange: ‘I read in the newspaper that you won a prize.’ ‘Yes, mother, I didn’t tell you about it because it wasn’t terribly important to me.’ ‘No, it wasn’t to me ...”