“... he recommended Angus Wilson’s first book to Cecil Beaton. That same year, however, when Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman, he thought the news ‘quite tiresome’. Later in 1949, he described the arrival of Auden on Ischia as having ‘thrown something of a gloom’ over the island (‘Such a tiresome old Aunty’). Before the month ...”

“... branches in the Bettys chain) no longer does organic produce as they’ve changed their flour miller. ‘However,’ she assures me, ‘the flour is locally produced.’ As are, presumably, its pesticide residues. When I ask why the flour could not be locally produced and nevertheless be organic she cannot explain. Money is, I imagine, the short answer ...”

“... throwing him into a career as an all-round man-of-letters, which he pursued with gusto. Karl Miller, a frequent commissioner of his reviews for the Spectator and the New Statesman during the late 1950s and 1960s, recalled Amis’s impact in this role: ‘To the older literati he was his jokes and sneers and funny faces, a low and vulgar fellow – which ...”

“... has carefully gone through. In his note on ‘Carnal Knowledge’, Wilmer quotes a letter to Karl Miller, written in July 1952, in which Gunn describes his efforts at heterosexual sex and writes that two heterosexual male friends are at present trying to persuade me to make love to a dear little girl from Leeds whom they assure me has indicated I would not be ...”

“... projected eleven-play cycle. ‘I took it as my credo,’ Wilson wrote, ‘and sought to answer James Baldwin’s call for a profound articulation of the Black tradition that could sustain a man once he left his father’s house.’With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out to dramatise the ‘dazed and dazzling … rapport with ...”

“... in 1927, then under the protection of the League of Nations, and like Charles Dickens, Jan Neruda, James Joyce, Theodor Fontane and his acknowledged exemplar Alfred Döblin, he places his native city at the centre of his creative imagination. Grass’s best work so far is given over, again and again, to its evocation: a very special piety ties him to the ...”

“... to give way to interiority: it became a psychic injury, a ‘thorn in the spirit’, as William James put it, an injury done not to the body but to the mind by violence, or by any unspeakable or unassimilable experience. In the 19th century and much of the 20th these mental wounds were understood to be represented in the body by such symptoms as ...”

“... Greenwich Village, and through one of the actresses there met and began taking classes with Allan Miller, a disciple of Lee Strasberg. She auditioned for Strasberg’s Actors Studio aged sixteen, and though she didn’t get in they encouraged her to try again later; piqued, she never did. When she left school in January 1960, she had her first role ...”

“... we’re getting some momentum built up.’ I heard about happiness. I heard Lieutenant General James Mattis say that ‘it’s a lot of fun to fight’ in Iraq. I heard him say: ‘You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. I like brawling.’ I heard that Donald Rumsfeld had created his own intelligence agency, the Strategic Support Branch, ‘designed to operate ...”

“... or fantasised into the state.’‘Diremption’ is an odd word, only occasionally used by A.V. Miller in the standard translation of the Phenomenology. Rose herself, I think I’m right in saying, never used it before The Broken Middle, but then came to use it a lot. ‘Diremption,’ she writes at a key point, ‘draws attention to the trauma of ...”

“... Touch, Bloch’s study of the medieval belief, which in England persisted down to the time of James II, that the king could cure scrofula by laying hands on the sufferer – a puzzle in any modern retrospect. Today, few would question that Bloch was the greatest historian of his age, or that The Historian’s Craft remains unsurpassed as a reflection on ...”

“... Street, paying half in cash.Warhol made it clear that ‘he did not want to be known as the I. Miller show guy.’ But his work as an artist did not have the same success as his commercial work. In the early 1950s he showed some of his homoerotic work at the Tanager Gallery, a trendy co-op space, though it was decided that his pictures ‘weren’t ...”

“... like a year. I went to make some money and spent all of it while I was there.Was that when you met James Dickey?He played bluegrass music and he had this lake on his property and was forever showing off his muscles and thighs. At one point he said: ‘Yes, I’m so big, I’m so goddamn big! And no cocksucking English critic’s gonna tell me any ...”

“... exhausted by working, and miserable that she didn’t have enough time to write. She read instead: James, Woolf (‘I shall go better than she. No children until I have done it’) and Lawrence: ‘Why do I feel I would have known & loved Lawrence – how many women must think this and be wrong!’ They had a lot of morning sex.In June 1958, she had her first ...”

“... the absence of climate sceptics in high places; and the Cambridge associate professor of divinity James Orr, who has hosted both Jordan Peterson and the notorious peddler of race science Charles Murray at events for Trinity Forum Europe, a conservative Christian charity.These men, together with other right-wing academics, reportedly began meeting in Cambridge ...”