“... criticism. Kraus’s first ambition had been to be an actor. His contemporary, the playwright Frank Wedekind, thought Kraus had missed his vocation by not working in the theatre. He would describe himself instead as ‘perhaps the first case of a writer who simultaneously experiences the process of writing as an actor’. Just as the mask was one of the ...”

“... said in the larger works of which it is an epigone, it at least has the advantage that Samuel Johnson commended in handbooks, of allowing you to go to the fireside and read in comfort. Given this convenience, a pursuit of etymologies is a pleasurable, skipping business, with much to reveal waywardly, not only about the quarry, the word, but also about the ...”

“... version from a publishing house in Casablanca. The censor’s objections were predictable: its frank, neutral descriptions of homosexuality and masturbation were deemed to offend local sensitivities. But Ibrahim’s own view was that the censors were using ‘the sexual references … as a cover to forbid anyone talking about imprisonment and ...”

“... a day. He seems to have suffered from anxiety and depression throughout his life and was quite frank about it in public, explaining that mental illness was like any other kind of illness and that those who suffered from it shouldn’t be ostracised. He seems never to have suffered another major episode. The most fascinating sections of Guralnick’s book ...”

“... is more equivocal. He seems to have taken seriously criticism from the gay congressman Barney Frank, who called him a ‘naive attention seeker’ and argued that he should have followed the less flashy model of working to change the law. He also recognises – how could he not? – that the backlash was severe, culminating in Proposition 8, a California ...”

“... all restrictions relating to sex, so making possible the current explosion of pornography and frank talk in the media and the home. Second, it significantly reduced the role of the marriage-bonded family. It made sexual cohabitation socially and morally acceptable as a stage prior, or as an alternative, to formal marriage; and it caused a change in both ...”

“... superficially at least – far more harmonious. From Our ’Enry through Gary Mason and Big Frank Bruno (but not Joe Bugner, who was Hungarian, refused to play the game and was disliked by all on both counts) the cult of the deferential, smiling bruiser still holds sway. We expect our fighters to behave like Sergeant Paine in The Third Man who punches ...”

“... Sidney’s Arcadia was now judged frivolous, and its political content was lost to view. Dr Johnson, on reading Lycidas, was shocked to find ‘trifling fictions mingled with the most sacred and awful truths.’ The word ‘truth’ was in any case changing in usage. Renaissance poets had promised ‘truth’, but now it was widely understood to be the ...”

“... Williams, who knew Orwell and later wrote of him much more resentfully, he was ‘brave, generous, frank and good’. Despite being chronically sick and temperamentally standoffish, he was astonishingly engaged and industrious; in one year he produced an article every two or three days, and Taylor provides us with the surreally useless bit of information that ...”

“... a thief called Benny Barnett, who taught him to steal cars and introduced him to Jean Lucinda Johnson, a precocious 16-year-old whose ‘skin was the warm reddish brown of a perfectly roasted turkey breast the moment it comes from the oven’. She would become his first wife. Himes quit college at 17, and began to pack a .44 calibre Colt. ‘It was much ...”

“... and ‘barbarous’. Garrick was still arousing gasps of awe as the prince, and Samuel Johnson loved the play. But neoclassical principles generally demand clear form and order, and a self-evident morality, and these are choices that Hamlet has always been able to frustrate or violate. This restricted sense of the civilised re-emerged last century ...”

“... composers in the American maverick tradition, from Charles Ives, Cage and Morton Feldman to Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix and Sun Ra.The revolution that began at the Five Spot was part of the wider black freedom struggle, as well as an extension of an American philosophy of self-reliance and artistic emancipation that runs from Emerson to Whitman to Allen ...”

“... and overwritings which, while visually creating a symbol of aesthetic tussle not unlike a Frank Auerbach drawing and securing the myth of Beethoven as a heroically patient grappler with crude ideas, in strictly musical terms often amount to a radical recasting of the music, a decisive continuation of composition at ‘fair copy’ or autograph ...”

“... Divine Comedy, for example). And the case for imitation is made forcibly by Johnson’s ‘Vanity of Human Wishes’, where Johnson collaborates with Juvenal to create a poem which is modern and therefore original, as well as being part of Classical tradition. Nowadays, some poets feel a slight ...”

“... but that the few English critics who bother with theory are tourists: mid-Atlantic figures like Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner, or Francophiles like Stephen Heath and Stephen Bann. Samuel Johnson had moral principles, but nothing like a theory of literature: he didn’t need one. The force of English common sense is that ...”