“... The test of poetry which professes to be modern’, Arthur Symons wrote in 1892, is ‘its capacity for dealing with London, with what one sees or might see there.’ And what the poets see is a transformation of the human face. In the country, ‘The face of every neighbour whom I met/Was as a volume to me,’ Wordsworth recalled in The Prelude, but neighbours were harder to read in London: ‘The comers and goers face to face,/Face after face ...”

“... to a girl from the North Riding and a man who made his own greasepaints. But Stan’s father, Arthur Jefferson, did more than that: he was a theatrical entrepreneur and a writer of plays and sketches. Stan grew up in the theatre, making his first stage appearance at the Glasgow Britannia Theatre in 1906. Jefferson later spoke about what ...”

“... idiotic and unnecessary tennis knick-knacks like T-shirts and caps, there’s the sullen crowd of young pros dressed as walking billboards for Hertz, Movado or Volvo rather than as tea-sipping athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become ...”

“... in Gay’s view, gives an equal interest to the diary of a Dodd, an Amiel, or a Mabel Barrows, a young lady of 16 who in 1885 was keeping an artless private record at St Margaret’s School in Waterbury, Connecticut. ‘Mabel’, as she liked to be known to her friends – her real name was Mary – had various crushes on her fellow students (‘Carrie and I ...”

“... came a question from the audience. What did I think was the biggest mistake the New Left made? If young radicals wanted to reach the ‘masses’, I replied, they should connect means to ends and refrain from abusing the symbols of American patriotism. The American New Left was almost unique in turning against America’s own patriotic heroes and ...”

“... absurdity, it bears the stamp of an adult mind. Can we really suppose that a child of seven, too young to write out the play for herself, who had to depend on her aunt as copyist, was capable not just of composing such a work but of composing it in her head? If ‘Grandison’ was written later than 1800, when Anna might have been old enough to conceive the ...”

“... sense of pleasure.’She was not encouraged to think of herself as a literary celebrity. As a young woman, she wrote her novels on the sitting-room table at which her mother sewed: her family were proud of her early success, but would, she said, have felt ‘almost humiliated’ had they thought her composition required any ‘artificial aids’, such as ...”

“... holiday. F.W. Murnau shot Nosferatu there – the place became a favourite film location – and young Leni Riefenstahl arrived to act in Arnold Fanck’s Holy Mountain. In 1928, Hitler came on a pilgrimage to see this potential bastion against England, accompanied by Goebbels and his doomed niece Geli Raubal. Meanwhile, money poured into the island, and ...”

“... to fail to acquire French a great disappointment. His friendships with such as Lady Gregory and Arthur Symons offered him only limited access to either language. Despite his wretched start and these persistent incapacities, he became a remarkably well-read intellectual, with a passion for Nietzsche, for Plato and Neoplatonism, for learned Italian ...”

“... British Government chose to disregard in 1917. Some thirty years afterwards the English Zionist Arthur Koestler described the Balfour Declaration as ‘one of the most improbable documents of all times’, since in it ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’. ‘Iimprobable’ the Balfour Declaration undoubtedly was, yet ...”

“... When​ I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green ...”

“... a fierce, authoritative denunciation of his audience: ‘Thou art the man!’ (II Samuel xii 7). Young Michael was brought up vaguely C of E (like both his parents) and did not feel that the potent Hebraic name of Nathan really belonged to him. He seems to feel that ‘race’ should be a subject for amusing fantasy, not to be taken seriously. Just at the ...”

“... about his verse. While working sporadically at the Bar, he came to know a cluster of thoughtful young women who called themselves ‘the Grecians’ and were dubbed ‘the Settee’ by the father of one of them, Mary Coleridge, ‘because they just sat and sat’. Together with Mary, Newbolt set about writing a historical thriller called The Debt of ...”

“... you were also very shy, as Robert Mapplethorpe was (born in 1946, he was in the 1960s still a very young artist making jewellery, collages and assemblages inspired by Joseph Cornell, and not yet taking photographs inspired by Nadar, Stieglitz and Steichen), you wouldn’t merely have been afraid of being seen, you would have dreaded it. In private, you would ...”

“... the three years of life remaining to him was intermittently though unsuccessfully dunned by the young man he condemned as ‘destitute of honor & principle every day of his life has only served to confirm his debased nature’. In the years of journalistic hackwork that followed he fell out with almost every editor and proprietor who employed him, and ...”