“... Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big House. But it was clear to me that there was one poet included in both these anthologies who really meant business. His name, like his poems, had a wilful, manufactured look. (He had, in fact, changed it by deed poll ...”

“... and started to smash the place up. The comrades escaped across the rooftops, Jim falling through a glass roof, his left leg scarred for life as ‘proof’ of this adventure. Perhaps it was a tall tale, not untouched by blarney. In the 1960s the BBC series One Pair of Eyes devoted a programme to Claud Cockburn. There is a sequence in which Claud and Jim stroll ...”

“... one of his periodic financial panics, was to deny his thirsty parent, when he came to call, the glass of sherry he craved but was too shy and too mannerly to ask for. Mother retired to South Africa, where she formed a relationship which excluded her husband, though she retained a rather scatterbrained affection for Cyril. One of the mature Cyril’s many ...”

“... was only a movie. The Philadelphia Story was written specifically for and partly about her by Philip Barry. It had a two-year run on Broadway, and (since Howard Hughes had bought her the rights) she starred in the film version for MGM. Quite apart from the life it portrayed, for a time The Philadelphia Story was her life. Many scripts were written with ...”

“... knowing winks from the participants in a forgery: at the first performance of Vortigern, John Philip Kemble in the title role hammed up the line ‘And when this solemn mockery is o’er’, and repeated it several times, to titters from his audience. Phillips’s game is to create a Shakespearean feel, then give you a false note, then offer multiple ...”

“... in the Crusades used the communications technology of the day. Public sermons, hymns, stained glass and identifying tattoos could excite and motivate, and the potentially crusading public was groomed as surely as impressionable modern teenagers absorbed in radical websites. We will be less bewildered by Islamic State and its success so far if we ...”

“... is that ‘writing is never spontaneous.’ So too, as he pointed out in an interview with Philip Roth, the truth told in The Truce is ‘filtered truth’, each episode having been ‘preceded by countless verbal versions’ and retouchings as it was recounted by Levi to his friends and family. Levi’s writing about the Holocaust and its ...”

“... Aesop was painted most likely in the late 1630s, as part of the decor of the Torre de la Parada, Philip IV’s hunting lodge outside Madrid. It would be good to know something of its original place in the building, or at least be sure that the Torre was its first destination, but as usual with Velázquez the court records are mute. (Even Las Meninas is a ...”

“... dynastic portraits need big houses. Both need a deferential cast of mind. When, in the Sixties, Philip Johnson built an underground art bunker close by his famous glass house in New Canaan, he dramatised the division which had grown up between the collecting of art and the embellishment of rooms. Art, driven out by ...”

“... to join the silent conspiracy which now unites all the English poets from Robert Graves down to Philip Larkin, and all the critics, editors and publishers too, the conspiracy to pretend that Eliot and Pound never happened. Tomlinson refuses to put the clock back to pretend that after Pound and Eliot, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens have written in ...”

“... be accommodated and yet won’t nearly suffice. Amis once proposed ‘never being satisfied’ as Philip Roth’s great theme, but it is the boundless nature of need that he, too, endlessly celebrates and satirises. And if Amis is the poet of profligacy, the expert on excess, it is because he is himself full of what he might call male need-to-tell, what John ...”

“... Dalley’s recent biography of Diana Mosley. You rather imagine her, nose pressed up against the glass, longing to roar along with the Duchess of Devonshire (whom, she informs us, she once met at dinner), but not quite knowing how. Of course, some people miss the joke altogether – posh girls sniggering: what’s funny about that? – or disapprove because ...”

“... same way, editors are often to be found with their favourite children’s authors, trying, over a glass of herbal tea, to persuade them to write something simple but heart-warming that might prove to have ‘crossover appeal’ in the adult market. Britain didn’t grow Elvis or Coca-Cola, but it grew Billy Fury and Irn Bru, and the great new self-help ethos ...”

“... Pico della Mirandola, Leonardo, Milton, Rameau, Sade, Mozart, Balzac, Darwin, Wagner, Rodin, Philip Pullman and a supporting cast of hundreds. A single page, selected at random and by no means the most thickly populated, scatters references to Conrad (Joseph), Hesiod, Rilke, Shakespeare, Plato, Mann, George Eliot, Gide and St John. Quite how much Conrad ...”

“... finesse and a military-trained marksman. He had been at Reed College in Portland with Snyder and Philip Whalen, a formidable Pacific Rim triumvirate of youthful poets and seekers. Heavily dosed on Gertrude Stein, and fired up by a chance encounter with William Carlos Williams, Welch was confirmed in his destiny as an outsider, a casual labourer, cab ...”