“... The term is one that she took from the natural sciences, and when she adopted it she may have been thinking of Proust, who had recently made such apt and witty use of Maeterlinck’s L’lntelligence des fleurs in describing the first, charmingly camp pas de deux between the Baron de Charlus and his newest heart-throb, Jupien. In biology, a ...”

“... The late Angela Carter once told me I was a ‘formalist’. We didn’t meet often, and this may have been the first time we did, in which case it was at a party. It had slipped my mind that I don’t smoke, and I cadged a cigarette off her in exchange for reciting the first sentence of one of her novels (‘On my last night in London I paid you a small ...”

“... Mallarmé’s ‘seigneur latent qui ne peut devenir’ – had long attracted Segalen, who may or may not have seen something of that broodingly estranged son in himself, as he fought to escape from the orbit of an interfering mother, and was quick to find real-life Hamlets in faraway courts, notably that of the ...”

“... As Major-General Skippon, who knew his soldiers well, observed when warning Parliament in May against ‘the disobliging of so faithful an army’, ‘provocation and exasperation makes men think of that they never intended.’ By June the Army was assuming a political role commensurate with its contribution to victory. It demanded guarantees of ...”

“... being given by Jones on ‘Early Female Sexuality’ and Joan Riviere, and those from Vienna by Robert Waelder. In June 1938, the Nazi annexation of Austria forced Freud and his family to flee to London, whither they had been preceded by a number of Berlin analysts. (Most of the Viennese analysts went on to America; only Willi and Hedwig Hoffer settled in ...”

“... engage in such retaliatory actions?’ Her answer, suggestive but tantalisingly brief, is that it may have been the effect of suicide – an act of violence, Freud suggested, ‘always aimed at more than one person’. But there’s more – the surfeit, excess and plethora that seem to be so much a part of the story. Art simplifies but life really piles it ...”

“... and cold and inconsiderate. One begins to see parallels with Lawrance Thompson’s quest for Robert Frost: as Thompson, at first a hero-worshipper, dredged deeper into the material that eventually became his big biography, the hero began more and more to take on the lineaments of a monster. When she set out on her quest for the truth, Polly already knew ...”

“... more often floury or waxy than glazed; the objects are solidly there, sparingly translucent. They may glow, they do not glitter. Matisse had to have the real thing – girl or oyster – in front of him when he painted. And it had to be fresh: for one still-life he renewed his oysters every day and had a boy on hand to water the fish for another. The results ...”

“... a bay), William Baffin (who became an island) and Vitus Bering (who became a strait). He describes Robert Peary claiming the North Pole for America, and how, to keep up the morale of his men, Richard Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with ...”

“... where problems of crowding, poverty and racial tension are endemic, riots do not start. New York may not have found the preventive cure for rioting, but it was clear in those tumultuous long hot summers of the late Sixties that the City Government and the New York Police were doing something right. It is easy to forget that John Lindsay, still burdened with ...”

“... of people who did ‘some not wholly fulfilling thing’ – Cuchulain fighting the waves, Robert Gregory taking to the air – their fulfilment to be achieved only when Yeats had emblematised them in strong verse. Seven: Dublin is a capital city in which ‘eight decades’ experience of the telephone has not yet fostered the habit of returning ...”

“... this article is intended to provide instead of opinions. My ensuing truths, my later rightnesses, may not be such obviosities, but unless they live up to this one’s objectivity, I shall accept that I have failed. Now, what gives me the right to imply that I speak with such authority on the rights and wrongs, the truths and delusions of broadcasting? There ...”

“... in so many ways, footling, offensive, a bad, interminable joke; and sympathetic commentators may be reminded of those who dutifully spoke for the defence at the Lady Chatterley trial while feeling that it was a bad book. Frank Kermode, writing of what he approvingly termed ‘decreative’ Modernist poets in a 1966 essay on T.S. Eliot, suggested that one ...”

“... Sylvia Plath, who records being mesmerised, both by Hughes as a person and by his work. On 3 May 1956 she wrote to her mother to tell her that ‘Ted has written many virile, deep banging poems,’ and in her journal, describing their first meeting, she remembered: ‘And I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then kissed me bang smash on ...”

“... unbearable to him, whereas the martyr gives up his most precious possession in the hope that good may flow from it. In Christian theology, what determines whether or not you can embrace death in this way is how you have lived. If you have failed in life to divest yourself for the sake of others, you will be trapped like William Golding’s Pincher Martin in a ...”