“... railings there. Slept sweeter Than kings the country folk in thatch or slate shade. Peace had the grey West, fierce clouds in its power. Out on much-Severn I thought waves readied for laughter, And the fireswinger promised behind elm-pillars Showed of a day worthy of such dawn to come after. There’s little of autumn and none of summer’s flowering and ...”

“... of Waugh is a violent declaration of distance between the two species. I disapproved of his grey suede shoes, his floppy bow tie and the excessive width of his trousers; he struck me as flaccid and petulant and I disliked him on sight. Later he asked me, at second hand, if he could accompany me into the Danakil country, where I planned to travel. I ...”

“... to light a fire any more. My husband thought we’d moved into a ship. All the walls were painted grey, battleship grey. Everything was grey except the wall where my books are and the bathroom, which was red, a dusty red.’ The Kendalls avoided the alienation from the familiar rhythms of ...”

“... delete you. The cursor returned and clicked on the second column. Presently a thing like a solid grey-white cauliflower rose until it was a mountain covering all south Manhattan. This is how we bury you. It was the most open atrocity of all time, a simple demonstration written on the sky which everyone in the world was invited to watch. This is how much we ...”

“... right. The earth didn’t move.’We were on the ferry from Holyhead. The day was grey and damp, with mist banking over the sea. As we sat in the cafeteria, Karl kept looking out the window. He said he was trying to work out where the coast was. He looked at me and showed an expression I’m not sure he’s aware of having, a broad grin that ...”

“... opens, ‘Here in this bleak city of Rochester’, and goes on to invoke the natives ‘Of this grey, sunless city’. But it may have been a useful place from which to view the vagaries and venalities of other poets. There is a wonderful letter from 2000 written to Hoy in which Hecht remembered writing a Guggenheim recommendation for Louis Simpson and then ...”

“... of money, jealousy, hero-worship – and thusward’. He once objected to an exam question on Stephen Vincent Benét (‘I could not permit my mind to be profaned by such intellectual whorishness’) and wrote an essay on Paul Valéry instead. ‘To know you is a calamity,’ one of his classmates told him.Schwartz would sequester himself in his ...”

“... not only stereotyped and tiresome but dated in a way that Leopold Bloom’s responses to women, or Stephen Dedalus’s don’t seem dated. There is no element of richness or surprise, and there is a terrible ironic distance and jauntiness (more noticeable in The Luck of Ginger Coffey and The Emperor of Ice-Cream). Clearly, the passage quoted above could not be ...”

“... hardly cosy is consoling, too, both of us happiest reading what we know already. 11 October. Stephen Page (Faber) and Andrew Franklin (Profile Books) come round to take delivery of the MS of Untold Stories, a collection of diaries and other memoirs which they are to publish jointly next September. It’s in a big box file with some of the stuff in ...”

“... were written to members of the Norton family.) With the Nortons in London, James saw Leslie Stephen, whom James’s father had also known, and met Charles Dickens’s daughter, who was, he reported to Alice, ‘plain-faced, ladylike (in black silk & black lace)’, and visited William Morris and his family. Mrs Morris was ‘a figure cut out of a missal ...”

“... and crisper in its black/white contrasts than its rival, the Sunday Times, which looked untidy and grey by comparison. Throughout the 1950s it was the dominant ‘quality’ Sunday paper, certainly in its cultural and political influence among the young if not always in terms of its circulation. It belonged to the era of what Lewis calls the ‘benign ...”

“... Egerton at the National Gallery tells me that Breakspears was once the childhood home of Elizabeth Stephen, the bride of William Hallett, who together constitute Gainsborough’s Morning Walk, and that Reynolds’s Captain Tarleton used to hang in the house. Captain Tarleton is one of the paintings (another being Millais’s Lorenzo and Isabella) which would ...”

“... of, in turn, Edna St Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Roethke, Virginia Woolf and Stephen Vincent Bénet.When her friend Ann Davidow left Smith after one term, Plath’s first letter to her, written through tears, told her that although she’d come third in the nationwide Seventeen short story contest, ‘what the hell do I care about ...”

“... It’s all because they wouldn’t let me play football.Oh dear. You sound like that poem by Stephen Spender, telling the world how scared he was of the rough boys who threw stones.Please don’t. I’d better shut up.You could have been a contender. My point is you did become a contender.In a way, yes. I’m still pretty good at football, except I’m a ...”

“... shoes were involved I haven’t discovered. For long a fervent Wagnerian – his first name for Stephen Wonham was Siegfried – Forster came in time to regard the leitmotifs of The Ring as a bit blatant, incessantly directing one’s attention to ring, sword, Valhalla. He admitted to his interviewers that he had learned from the Wagnerian leitmotifs, but ...”