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“... a brief stint as professor of creative writing at Glasgow University, a position shared with Tom Leonard and James Kelman; and nice gigs as a celebrity designer of murals at Hillhead subway station and at the Oran Mór arts centre. In terms of politics, however, Gray and the new Glasgow are at loggerheads. In 1990 he lampooned the European City of Culture ...”

“... pages of adverts, assuming an average of 300 words per page; this equals some 3.1 million words to read … about equivalent to reading 21 books of the length of Ulysses.’ Attempting to honour modernism’s internationalist ambition makes the task even more onerous, as every country sprouted its own magazines. A synoptic view of the modernist little magazine ...”

“... and celebrated by such admirers as Ernest Hemingway: ‘When the fakers are all dead they will read Matthews in the schools to find out what really happened,’ Hemingway announced in 1938. But nothing compared with the rage and opprobrium that followed the publication of his Castro interview. Colleagues shunned him; the FBI investigated him; congressional ...”

“... of the self-involvement of (say) Alain Besançon, the humourless righteousness of Richard Pipes or Leonard Schapiro’s cold disdain. There was a jokey, blokey aspect to Conquest, a whiff of the Oxford debating society and student satirical review, that made him an anomalous figure in international Sovietology, which – apart from Abe Brumberg’s ...”

“... Library.’ It’s possible there was more to it than that. In 1925, a wealthy white man called Leonard Rhinelander applied to have his marriage to Alice Jones annulled, claiming that his wife had not disclosed her mixed-race ancestry. After a high-profile trial, the jury ruled that no deception had taken place (the characters in Passing discuss the ...”

“... odd hero for a writer whose sentences are so unencumbered and who was also besotted by Elmore Leonard), but she was happy to be accused of consistency: she believed in the salutary power of memory, and the value of precedent. Consistency, after all, was the logical outcome of her loyalty to those beliefs, and to the people and events that marked her ...”

“... drinking himself into sullenness and nausea, about his or her appeals for sympathy and advice from Leonard and Virginia Woolf or Ottoline Morrell, or one or another of the Sitwells or Geoffrey Faber and his wife. Anyone who reads even a portion of this material is bound to wonder how the Eliots managed to stay together as long as they did, and how they ...”

“... and a short study of Byron’s daughter Allegra, both issued in 1935. The latter was published by Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, which led to her meeting with Virginia Woolf, whose diaries describe her as ‘tremulous’, ‘honest-eyed’ and very glamorous: ‘I like her bird of paradise flight through the gay world. A long green feather in her hat ...”

“... tears rolled, like stones, and he died’) I thought sadder than anything in Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen. I was also interested in Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Another September’, because I knew the house just outside Enniscorthy where it was set and I had met the poet’s wife, whose sleeping figure was evoked in the poem. What was most interesting about ...”

“... kind of takeover bid: that made by the ‘Society’ of readers and of criticism. He needs to be read, but read on his own terms. Shakespeare said in the Sonnets: ‘Noe, I am that I am.’The Sonnets are in themselves a monument to that struggle, a battle both lost and won. The attempt to make Shakespeare a ‘company ...”

“... him.’ Such casual racism was common at the time, as was antisemitism. In 1930, Nicolson was at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s house when the Foreign Office nomination board was discussed, and ‘the awkward question of the Jews arises … Jews are far more interested in international life than are Englishmen and if we opened the service it might be flooded ...”

“... lantern leading the way: some other lanterns glimmering: the scent of wild thyme’.The people who read about Brooke in the papers knew nothing of this, and nothing of his charm and beauty (Leonard Woolf: ‘His looks were stunning – it is the only appropriate adjective’; W.B. Yeats: ‘the handsomest young man in ...”

“... on the Soviet Union’s development in the Twenties; being a tireless worker, he was prepared to read through quantities of indigestible Soviet material to the end of his life. Regularly, despite his age, the volumes succeeded each other. Carr brought many gifts to the study of Russia. He could handle many languages, and his training as a Classical scholar ...”

“... amateur from a pianist like Gould is a matter of total difference, not degree. To be able to sight-read and memorise anything, to translate one’s reading of notes on a page into an immediate sound on the instrument, using one’s fingers in mostly unnatural ways, to have the confidence (this is of capital importance) to know that one can do this at any ...”

“... at Stead, the moving spirit of the crusade. In a letter from Paris to the publisher of the Savoy, Leonard Smithers, himself a great connoisseur of erotica, Beardsley noted: ‘I read in the papers here that Stead has established an agency for the adoption of children. Is it true? If so I certainly mean to adopt some nice ...”