“... half the length of the epic Clara, and a rich, flamboyant, mannered book, written with condensed, self-conscious stylishness, dazzling with images and sensations and violence, and daring you to resist it from its first outrageous sentence: ‘Francisco Solano López put his penis inside Eliza Lynch on a lovely spring day in Paris, in 1854.’ Clara is ...”

“... The chapter on Edith Sitwell is wonderfully funny. A luncheon at her club when this tremendously self-important poetess, temporarily disconcerted by a bluebottle caught in the Venetian blinds, affected a swoon until the insect was dispatched is worthy of Lytton Strachey; as is the ceremony of her being received into the Catholic Church. A long telegram ...”

“... that he would be willing to compromise on the issue of independence provided Beijing allowed Tibet self-governance: a one-country, two-systems arrangement, as in Hong Kong. Beijing will have none of it. One option for the Tibetans is to be patient, and hope that the CCP crumbles before they do. They might have time on their side: the Dalai Lama’s personal ...”

“... the rewilding of its urban spaces along the Mediterranean coast and the restoration of Egyptian self-rule. The girdle-wearers, ‘being followers of Typhon’ (the Greek name for Seth, the Egyptian god of Chaos), ‘will slay themselves’, he says, imagining the stench of unburied corpses pervading the city. His oracle is both a political prophecy about ...”

“... mock pomposity in Joseph Andrews. In a work published just days after the fall from office of Sir Robert Walpole – ‘prime minister’ in a sense that had no constitutional legitimacy at the time, and implied an alarming concentration of power – there was nothing innocent about the joke. Walpole’s self-promotion was ...”

“... the letters do add a dimension to our reading of Hardy. He comes out so plainly as the tenacious, self-interested Dorset man of modest station, more or less self-educated, determined to keep his end up, intellectually and socially, though neither his ideas nor his social graces were exactly distinguished. What distinguished ...”

“... horror, psychological realism and fantasy, the stories are written in a smug tone that recalls a self-professed neurotic on a first date cheerfully outlining his adolescent traumas and the ensuing ‘issues’. (A couple of the stories are centred on such a guy, to grating effect.) The lack of mystery isn’t terrible, just deflating, and a little ...”

“... extreme difficulty, of writing a novel worth reading. This seems to be in part everyday fear of self-exposure, for which, in interviews, she tends to blame a hypercritical mother, and in part ambivalence about seeking a mass audience. On top of that, she has a nasty case of belatedness with regard to her favourite writers – they include ...”

“... founder of the Bodleian Library. On his return he was apprenticed to a leading London goldsmith, Robert Brandon, whose daughter Alice he later married. His subsidiary skills as a jeweller and engraver belong within the ambit of goldsmithery, but there is no indication of who, if anyone, trained him in portraiture. His acknowledged master was Hans Holbein the ...”

“... of. I do not believe that any among those of us who have written on Surrealism in general and on Robert Desnos in particular, admiring though we are of this poet who was the first to perform automatic sleep speaking (and always outperformed anyone and everyone at it) has wanted to make Conley’s claim, or indeed anything like it. So, were there nothing else ...”

“... time.’ (Dave Van Ronk said that.) That must be how every interviewer feels – except, it seems, Robert Shelton. It’s 1966: Dylan is talking to Shelton, whose book about him he has agreed to countenance, if not to ‘authorise’. He says something about his relationship with Joan Baez, and then asks: ‘Can you write this in your book? If you ...”

“... The institutions of culture dignify their exhibits: as James anticipated, they can make ‘even Robert Browning lose a portion of the bristling surface of his actuality’. Big editions, such as the still far from complete Longman Poems, or the Oxford Poetical Works (now up to Volume IX), or the rather less authoritative Ohio Complete Works (now up to ...”

“... until it becomes their proper nature. It is the same with writers and artists. Byron or David or Robert Lowell cannot slink off and become their ordinary selves in the intervals of being poets and painters and men of the age. Greta Garbo is always Greta Garbo, once she has found the part. But there is quite a different category of actor, as of ...”

“... novel, The Story of Elizabeth. Thackeray’s endorsement was the ground of an indestructible self-belief. Anny never quite outgrew a submissive dedication to his memory, but his death meant liberation. Her breezy assumption that there would always be enough money, with a little left over, caused her friends and family much bother. She was also a ...”

“... dealer in drugs, deism and demoralisation in general’ was the way the Morning Herald described Robert Wedderburn when he appeared in court in 1823. He had worked as a tailor for much of his adult life, but ‘Romance writer’ and ‘Circulatory Librarian’ are euphemisms: he’d been trading in pornography, and, much to the paper’s titillation, was in ...”