“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... spite of her infidelities. She celebrates my body down to the waist. That is all I allow myself to grant. The rest belongs to Georges and no one else in the world can touch it. The rest would make the sin too big; and anyway that rest is so accustomed to Georges that it throbs for no one but him. From one point of view, droll enough. But from the sapphist ...”

“... retold (they have been best explained before in instructional texts, like Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson’s wonderful but technical The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation), and even hard-to-follow business dealings are presented with something approaching the same intensity. (I found myself in a state of acute anxiety at several points ...”

“... to please his patrons and audiences has made his work less pleasing in the longer term. One can grant that all published writing, like all public life, requires some accommodation to its readership, and so some liaison with hypocrisy, and yet still be troubled by lines such as these, about Charles II: Music herself is lost, in vain she brings Her choicest ...”

“... were well known images of Venus in antiquity and in Renaissance Europe; Shakespeare, adapting Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch, describes Cleopatra as ‘O’erpicturing that Venus where we see/The fancy out-work nature’. The classical genre terms ‘tragedy’, ‘comedy’ and ‘pastoral’ were employed and analysed in the ...”

“... edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle. Now, in 1996, this same Hershel Parker, a professor of English at the University of Delaware, has constructed an alternative version meant to approximate the originally completed novel Melville delivered to Harpers. In the absence of any ...”