“... contradictions.’ Leaving aside the question of what Moody may mean here by ‘his culture’, to grant Pound heroic status from the outset is unwise. Moody nowhere says that Pound read Thomas Carlyle, but Carlyle’s notion of a church of literature taking the place of the Christian Church, and his emphasis on the ...”

“... a place to eat, lives in squalor, joins Baudelaire in intoning a desperate, Pharisaical prayer: ‘Grant me the grace to produce some fine verses that will prove to me that I am not the least of men, that I am not inferior to those I scorn.’ Rilke worked on Malte for the best part of ten years. The semi-autobiographical novel describes Rilke’s initial ...”

“... one such was the Hollywood therapist Oscar Janiger, whose celebrity clientele, including Cary Grant, Anaïs Nin and Jack Nicholson, spread the word enthusiastically in magazine interviews, essays and movie scripts. Timothy Leary was turned on to LSD by maverick enthusiasts who acquired the drug directly from Sandoz, as Leary himself did for his ...”

“... At times the sexuality of women’s bodies elicits oddly visceral effects: ‘I looked at Sir Thomas Champneys & thought of poor Rosalie; I looked at his daughter & thought her a queer animal with a white neck.’ ‘I had the comfort of finding out the other evening who all the fat girls with short noses were that disturbed me at the 1st H. Ball. They ...”

“... work had been recognised more pragmatically on the frontier itself, where in 1764 the explorer Thomas Morris, venturing into what is now Illinois, discovered to his surprise not only that he was not the first anglophone to have got so far west but that the locals already knew exactly how much the crown jewels of his culture were worth: ‘An Indian ...”

“... to its sovereignty. Egypt remained volatile, and in the same year the British were forced to grant it a degree of self-rule. In India they tried to retain the repressive policies introduced during the war; but the killing of four hundred demonstrators in Amritsar in April 1919 only accelerated the transformation of the Indian National Congress from a ...”

“... next ten years firefighting the publication of pirated editions. (The poem mocks, among others, Thomas Moore, who became his friend, and the critic Francis Jeffrey, who became his champion.) He came back to London with two manuscripts in his luggage: Hints from Horace, a gentler sequel to English Bards, in which he leavens the satire with some literary ...”

“... on them by Native humans’. This is of course difficult to confirm. Norton is unwilling to grant that, before this, European elites could feel genuine affection for their animals, since they treated them as objects of prestige and symbols of power, or as tools of herding and hunting.But there is evidence that some elite Europeans bonded closely with ...”

“... reluctant to give him an award. Still Severn boasted of it (according to Brown, who, together with Grant Scott in his fine 2005 edition of Severn’s letters and memoirs, gives a good sense of the tone of the man), lying to his friends about the money it brought him. Worse, he had been peripherally involved in the catfishing of Tom Keats as he lay dying, a ...”

“... and civil rights. In the same issue of the New York Times there is a long feature on the work of Thomas Kinkade, whom I first heard of as the only painter quoted on the Nasdaq stock index, where he has posted $125 million in revenue for this fiscal year. Kinkade sells reproductions of scenes such as a snow-covered cottage or a waterfall in the forest, which ...”

“... him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger Thomas, the murderous anti-hero of Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son; Baldwin wrote that ‘Mr Himes seems capable of some of the worst writing this side of the Atlantic.’ Jackson, whose previous book, The Indignant Generation, was a formidable history of black ...”

“... and might I presume on the leniency and compassion (this word underlined) of the assessors to grant me another six months to get my taxes in order? This was read out in a flat, bored voice so that, if one closed one’s eyes, one would swear that the reader – a terribly thin man – was simultaneously doing something else. I kept my eyes down, and ...”

“... slim volumes of these to appear, both of which he came to dislike, he was hesitant thereafter to grant permission for any more collections. Even as late as 1955, when Edel edited a Selected Letters, his work was still overseen by the family. ‘I remember removing a letter dealing with Guy Domville from the Selected Letters,’ Edel wrote, ‘because Billy ...”

“... then called, also entitled me to three years of Scottish Education Department postgraduate student grant. Sussex, I read, offered a one-year taught MA in philosophy, which included Marx and Hegel: the ideal conversion course. I applied, I was accepted, I had funding, off I went.The University of Sussex, established in 1961, was the first of Britain’s ...”

“... Clive Bell went to the Paris exhibitions, there were stories by David Garnett, features on Duncan Grant, and Woolf wrote five pieces, including one about Sir Walter Raleigh. Vogue still owed something to the society magazine that was the earliest incarnation of the American edition, and the first frontispiece went to Eileen Wellesley, daughter of the Duke of ...”