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“... Larsen. That summer, she spent most weekends alone in New York. She learned to swim (there was a beach craze popularised by Josephine Baker). ‘On Fifth Avenue one can’t tell the fays from the niggers these days,’ she wrote. Around this time, she wrote a short story called ‘Sanctuary’, which is nearly identical to ‘Mrs Adis’ by Sheila ...”

“... think-tankers and media magnates with bin Salman’s plans for the kingdom. Not long afterwards, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote a rapturous profile – ‘I, for one, am rooting for him to succeed.’ McKinsey also sketched the framework for Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 – a festival of privatisation, technological innovation, commercial ...”

“... for which all is dark inside’? This form of question – ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ Thomas Nagel asked in a hugely influential paper in 1974 – is philosophical shorthand for asking whether a creature is conscious. Many philosophers think consciousness is an all or nothing phenomenon: you either have it or you don’t. Humans have it, as do ...”

“... 1924 Edwin had published an article called ‘Women – Free for What?’ in which, channelling Thomas Carlyle, he wrote that ‘the age is an age of work; woman desires freedom, the right of every human being; and freedom in such an age can only mean the freedom to work.’ It was Edwin who sent Women: An Inquiry to Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press, but ...”

“... Holkham is the immutable fact and she understands it entirely as it relates to her family. Thomas Coke (1697-1759), who commissioned the house, is introduced as the first earl in the fifth creation, but neither William Kent, who was largely responsible for the design, nor Capability Brown, who also worked at Holkham, merits a mention. The Codex ...”

“... self-portrait’ is there, perhaps, in the form of Robertson Davies, Alasdair Gray, Russell Hoban, Thomas Pynchon.If critics too often reach for the same adjectives when describing Burgess’s work – comic, satirical, Swiftian, Rabelaisian – it’s because Burgess himself started rolling the ball in that direction. But to classify him as primarily a ...”

“... His intellect.’The V of the diaries is ‘severe’. He does not take his clothes off on the beach. He does not dance. His father was ‘a tyrant and a disciplinarian’ who died when V was 24, and he ‘hated’ his mother for no reason apparent here. (‘Well, I don’t want to lose touch with you. Because I love you,’ his mother says to H after the ...”

“... writers: a verse recipe in the manner of William King, 21 ‘Vignettes’ based on engravings by Thomas Bewick, and some distinctly Wordsworthian landscape poems feature in his collection. But where Clampitt hops about dottily – despite the decorous appearance of her stanzas – snatching at bits of Keats and Hopkins, Lindop writes out of a deep engagement ...”

“... to Lowell, to his dead brother Gerard, and his childhood friend Sebastian Sampas, who died on the beach at Anzio. Jack Kerouac never really left home; all his roads went through him, and brought him back again and again to the home of his mother – Mémère – a home he was never certain of. I zipped up my bags, and headed off to Baltimore. My American ...”

“... I saw no good reason why I couldn’t walk the shore from the village of Grain, along Cockleshell Beach to the London Stone; or, failing that, down a track past Rose Court Farm to Grain Marsh. But maps are deceptive: they entice you with pure white space, little blue rivulets, a church with a tower, the promise of a shell-hunting foreshore; and then they hit ...”

“... of himself’ and having ‘regained his innocence ... can go calmly to his death’. Neither Thomas Mann’s novella nor Britten’s treatment of it give an ounce of support for these readings. The imprisonment of Aschenbach’s mind in the maze of desire is imaged in the maze of Venice, a closed-in world, fetid with the stench of plague. Britten’s ...”

“... grey’. In each example, Kipling’s language is patently not inert, but, like the harp of True Thomas, birls and brattles in Kipling’s hands. We think of Kipling as a special, borderline case, but he is not. Arnold memorably damn ed Pope and Dryden as ‘classics of our prose’ in his essay ‘The Study of Poetry’, a critical manoeuvre Eliot then used ...”

“... as a ‘Nature Gem’ really all that different from an ‘Atlantis’ reconstructed on a Bahamian beach or the fake ruins of Hubert Robert, both of which she gives as examples of kitsch, just because one is real, the others fake, one melancholic, the others nostalgic? Both categories of object seem to me to trade on the viewer’s engrained sentiments and ...”

“... rather memorably, wandering the hills, ‘each irradiating each’. He also knew John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol, who – Taylor said, again memorably – was ‘nervous and still, deeply learned, a silent reservoir with a gleam’. Taylor’s daughter Una later wrote Guests and Memories: Annals of a Seaside ...”

“... site in the lesbian imagination. Stein and Toklas, Barney, Romaine Brooks, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, Dolly Wilde, Janet Flanner, H.D. – we’ve been hearing about them for ages and the line-up never changes. If anything, thanks to influential (and romanticising) books like Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank (1986) and Andrea Weiss’s Paris Was a ...”