“... to one another – Browning, Tennyson, Dickens – as others embroidered, or they’d take Sir Walter Scott on ‘tramps’ through the mountains. For entertainment, there were church socials, dance halls, Firemen’s Balls, the Glee Club, community players: ‘I am going to play Susie in “Triss”, and we had a rehearsal tonight … I have the stage all ...”

“... One would like to know more also about the para-political myths of rural and urban life (George Sand and Flaubert) or the Walter Benjamin myth of Paris as the capital of the 19th century. Gildea ends his account on a happy note: French political myths of both Left and Right are, he thinks, alive and ...”

“... National Endowment for the Arts): the other appointments announced on the same day were those of Walter Gropius to the committee on architecture and Basil Rathbone to the drama committee.’ The next page proceeds in the same vein: ‘At the end of the year, Auden was one of four new members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters: announcing ...”

“... the launching-sites had been destroyed or over-run and the two evil geniuses of the V-2, General Walter Dornberger and Werner von Braun, were relaxing at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, cosseted and well-fed by the Americans, who lost no time in rushing them to the United States to further the science of rocketry. (If V-weapons had rained on New York and the British ...”

“... a rowing boat among battleships’; or that taking up some obscure and unfortunate critic of Sir Walter Scott is ‘like reading a review by a jackal of a book written by a lion’; or that an error into which he fell in the course of his recovering the faith of a Christian was the persuasion that he could no more ‘meet’ God than Hamlet could meet ...”

“... with many names, different names for a familiar compound ghost.’ One of those names might be Walter Pater. In his essay on Coleridge, Pater referred to ‘that inexhaustible discontent, languor and homesickness . . . the chords of which ring all through our modern literature’. Eliot quoted those words in his essay on ‘Arnold and Pater’, only to ...”

“... levels in the exhibition, though it’s hard to define a pure mistake. At the innocentish end is George Romney’s pen and ink Study of the Conjuring of a Spirit from the Play ‘Henry VI’, to which the bookseller Walter Spencer added the initials ‘W.B.’ in the belief that it was by William Blake. Spencer was prone ...”

“... in the decadent platform’); and ‘A Lost Masterpiece’, an essayistic work of fiction by George Egerton – the pen name of Mary Chavelita Dunne, winningly known to her friends as Chav – in which a writer’s sacred reveries are suddenly destroyed by a woman with big feet. All this was interspersed with arresting illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley ...”

“... or translating Rimbaud. Meanwhile, pioneering scholars like Barbara Tuchman, Frank Manuel and George Whalley mined gold year after year from the lodes of ore in the libraries.The roots of this bookish postwar New York, as Denise Gigante shows in Book Madness, stretched back deep into the 19th century. Some of them also nourished Boston’s book culture ...”

“... became a bestseller. He exercised authority and displayed himself to his people through his words. George Herbert wrote that James ‘dost offer thyself to be gazed upon on paper’. He wrote religious meditations, a treatise on poetic theory and another against tobacco and a book about witchcraft, Daemonologie, written in dialogue form. While Daemonologie ...”

“... it wouldn’t have noticeably dimmed the young man’s appeal. Before long the German poet Stefan George came on the scene – Hofmannsthal’s gay friend Leopold von Andrian described him as looking like ‘an ageing hermaphrodite’, though he was no more than a hatchet-faced 23 – and was even more smitten. A sort of – chaste? – German pendant to ...”

“... the treasure of health’, which drew on the work of the 15th-century alchemists Thomas Norton and George Ripley, who in turn were indebted to the formulations of Ramon Llull, a 13th-century Majorcan polymath. The key to alchemy was deep reading, between texts and across the ages. Keynes’s scrabbling about for Newton’s papers was as nothing compared to the ...”

“... two novels with feminist themes under the pen name Henrie Waste (her full name was Henrietta Walter Stettheimer). Both were panned in the press. Bloemink portrays Ettie as envious and increasingly embittered, a conflicted steward of Florine’s legacy. She edited her sister’s diary with a heavy hand, removing passages she considered too damaging or ...”

“... stick. As for the exclusion of all signs of Land Art, the failure to put a photograph or two of Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field into an exhibition of the American art of our time is equivalent to not putting an engraving or two after the Sistine Chapel into an exhibition of the Italian art of its time. The presence of an illustrated essay on Land Art in ...”

“... Coupole’. ‘Henry’s gravelly voice let everyone immediately know that he was an American,’ George Whitman, the owner of the Shakespeare Bookshop in Paris, recently recalled. He never turned into one of those phoney American artists around town. Henry was a native American first, although he considered American air-conditioning a nightmare. He never ...”