“... of language with that of the physical body. Corpses and near corpses obsessed her. When Benjamin Newton, a young attorney who briefly worked with her father, died in 1854, Dickinson contacted a complete stranger, Edward Everett Hale, asking for details of Newton’s final hours. ‘You may think my desire strange,’ she wrote, but there was no one ...”

“... and a morality that can be formulated and talked about, not just sealed in the amber of Walter Pater’s cadences. His own talk about it, particularly when he shows it in splendid action in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is as good as Pound’s talk, and comes, as Pound’s does, from taking seriously what is being talked about by Guinicelli and Cavalcanti ...”

“... George Burns, George Jessel and Sophie Tucker, but the future movie mogul Harry Cohn, the young Walter Winchell and his own older brother. Signed by the Shubert Brothers in 1911, Jolson was the first product of the bastard forms of vaudeville and minstrel show to be legitimised on Broadway’s Great White Way, where he addressed his audience with an ...”

“... commissioning long disco mixes not from the artists themselves but from DJs like Tom Moulton and Walter Gibbons. Many of the successful DJ remixes in this era were relentlessly percussive, often incorporating salsa or African rhythms. Ironically, the longer mixes were rarely played in full: DJs using two copies of the record would just repeat the percussive ...”

“... in which he is pictured as ‘a walking satire’’ and there are similar observations by Benjamin Haydon and Mary Russell Mitford. A strain of misanthropy was certainly in him, and it was in his look: ‘brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative’’ as Coleridge described it, his eyes half visible under a frown, or lit by a fugitive mischief. This hooded ...”

“... He recognised us, but he couldn’t speak. Hugh was reading J.G. Lockhart’s Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott; a straw bookmark showed that he was halfway into Volume II. He had read Lockhart before: he had read all of Scott several times since he was a child. The lives of writers were one of his major preoccupations: this biography, written by Scott’s ...”

“... So were three of his children: Erika (also just most of the time; she made an exception for Bruno Walter, among others), Klaus and Golo. Suicide was a family theme too. Both of Thomas Mann’s sisters committed suicide, as did his sons Klaus and Michael, as did the second wife of his brother Heinrich. Also, gerontophilia. Bruno ...”

“... was a coward and often a bully of younger boys – according (if you look it up) to his brother Walter, who a little later served as a volunteer in Von Epp’s Freikorps to crush the Munich Soviet. It may be true, but one would want better evidence than that. What we really get, then, is a mosaic of pieces from diverse sources, some of which must be treated ...”

“... its most vivid street-level expression in avid consumerism. As Peter Gay put it, paraphrasing Walter Gropius: ‘The cure for the ills of modernity is more, and the right kind, of modernity.’ This could be Mod speaking. Gay’s reflection is from his 1968 book Weimar Culture, and its subtitle is also applicable here: The Outsider as Insider. The tension ...”

“... Rain’ (1965), in which Reich sampled and looped a Pentecostal street preacher called Brother Walter. Eno had also been listening to gospel, dub, Fela Kuti, Miles Davis. In a canny Arena documentary from 2010, Eno digitally recreates Donna Summer’s ‘State of Independence’, replacing its beautiful chorale backing with a multi-tracked choir of himself ...”

“... of this form has to begin there, however far it may then wander from him. Built around the work of Walter Scott, Lukács’s theory makes five principal claims. The classical form of the historical novel is an epic depicting a transformation of popular life through a set of representative human types whose lives are reshaped by sweeping social forces. Famous ...”

“... This has allowed the steady growth in power of a class of insiders and experts, first described by Walter Lippmann during the Thirties, whose technical skill and organic affiliations with the power structure gradually insulated them from scrutiny and accountability. It is my impression that whereas the first clandestine operatives as well as their immediate ...”

“... and Sidmouth. There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various ...”

“... After he had gone, the step from unbending refusal to gushing capitulation was a short one – Walter Veltroni coming to resemble a beaming picture-card out of the schoolboys’ albums he made his name distributing with copies of Unità, when he became editor of the paper. If the PCI’s idealism disabled it from grasping the material drives of the market ...”

“... really wanted to go out there and annoy people,’ Cale said. ‘So what happened? We had Walter Cronkite and Jackie Kennedy dancing to it.’Warhol’s association with the Velvet Underground led to the 1966 film Chelsea Girls. ‘When he was directing a film he was insane,’ Woronov remembered. ‘He wouldn’t say anything. And yet that very ...”