“... he would have had matter for it. However, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and it may well be that a single volume, closely packed as this one had to be, will serve his own and Cummings’s memory better. The general reader will hardly want two volumes on the whole population of 20th-century poets – nor, when one thinks of Johnson’s ...”

“... as he did. The same is true of his strange, half-envious, half-disapproving relationship with Richard Crossman, a Winchester and New College contemporary. After they left Winchester, Crossman was Jay’s closest confidant. But he let him down over an arrangement to share digs, and the shock to Jay was so ‘stunning’ that they did not speak again for ...”

“... for Pamela to receive her reward for supporting him, her appointment as US ambassador to France. Richard Holbrooke made the case on her death that we should view the arc of Pamela’s life as starting ‘at its end with her ambassadorship to France’. For liberal Americans, Pamela Harriman should be memorialised without reference to her sexual antics or her ...”

“... homoeroticism and Christianity. Yeats is using that metaphor of the hunted animal which Richard Ellmann has shown to be a traditional image that was ‘applied to Parnell in his last phase’ and adopted by both Yeats and Joyce. In Ulysses, Joyce designs an analogy between Parnell and ‘our saviour’, while the aesthetic identification with Christ ...”

“... recording of the fabric of daily life, they resemble Pilgrimage, in which, as the novelist May Sinclair noted approvingly, ‘nothing happens.’ Richardson was the third of four daughters of a man who sold the family grocery business in order to live as a ‘gentleman’. But the privileges she enjoyed – summer holidays by the sea, a good education ...”

“... it detracted not at all from his enjoyment of women. Brivati thinks that he and Dora Gaitskell may have had an arrangement which allowed for his probably quite numerous affairs, particularly his long relationship with Ian Fleming’s wife, Ann – certainly the Gaitskells often dined with one or both Flemings, making one wonder quite what the mutual ...”

“... to the masculine canon was a drawing, a doodle really, by Dorothy, Lady Burlington, the wife of Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, a great patron of art and architecture to whom Pope dedicated the last of his Moral Essays. Lady Burlington sketched Pope at a game of cards – perhaps ombre (aptly enough, an Englishing of the Spanish for ‘man’), the game ...”

“... such was the passion for it that, from Edward II on, English kings tried to ban it. Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV all passed edicts against it (it was getting in the way of archery and other martial pursuits). In 1457, James II of Scotland decreed that ‘fute-ball and golfe be utterly cryed down’, while Henry VIII made football a penal ...”

“... it as a decoy to distract attention from a highly embarrassing story, which was emerging slowly in May and June 2003, that the long-debated Iraqi weapons of mass destruction did not exist.’ Four weeks after the broadcast of Andrew Gilligan’s Today story, Campbell had not asked for an apology for it specifically, had not referred it to the BBC complaints ...”

“... investing something that might be called Life or Experience – it is a species of risk. Interest may or may not accrue; but art, James intimates, is a version of stocks and shares; the market fluctuates. Something is transformed – work is done on it – in the service of making interest, sustaining curiosity, keeping ...”

“... write con amore … was … no part of his character.’ Verse starved of parental love may well have problems attracting affection later. T.S. Eliot took a charitable interest in the case in 1921, but his contribution is rather reminiscent of Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre enjoining the Lowood girls to be glad of their burned breakfast: ‘We cannot ...”

“... from the other children as a literary sissy like Yates [sic] and Masters.’ In an interview with Richard Poirier for the Paris Review in 1960, a few years before his death, he reiterated that he hadn’t had ‘a very literary life’; he didn’t keep up with reviews or gossip. He told Poirier that when he first visited Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in ...”

“... the gullible midget hero.’ This insistence on shining a new light on unlikely sexual relations may help explain why the original version of Freaks was heavily cut and edited and no longer exists; why the film, even in its edited state, was banned in Britain for thirty years; and why American audiences flocked to see it in some places ...”

“... became in his flattery, the more Berenson resolved to hold his meaty embrace at bay. ‘He may turn out too animal, too overwhelmingly masculine, too Bohemian,’ he fretted: ‘he may expect me to drink and guzzle with him.’ Even at his most decorous and ingratiating, Hemingway gave off too much of the whiff of ...”

“... professional treatment. Whatever his feelings for his wife by this point – some commentators may have come to firmer conclusions than the evidence warrants – worry and guilt were substantial elements in the mix. And then there were the uncertainties arising from his irregular relations with the Muse. He had written practically no verse between mid-1915 ...”